Court Opinion

ID: 9748696
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 16:10:48.794945+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:38.606866
License: Public Domain

*411ROWLEY, Judge,
concurring:
I agree with the majority’s decision to affirm the trial court’s order refusing to remove the non-suit, and join in all of the majority’s opinion except for the paragraph on page 897 of the slip opinion discussing the liability of a beautician under § 402A of the Restatement of Torts, Second, for non-negligently applying a defective solution to a customer’s hair.
The majority, as does appellant, assumes without citation to any authority, that a beautician who applies a defective wave solution to a customer’s hair in the beauty shop is a “seller” of the defective product and is liable under § 402A for selling a “defective product.” My research has revealed no cases which support such a conclusion. Moreover, comment 1 to § 402A which discusses the application of defective wave treatments to a person’s hair in a beauty salon does not provide authority for the conclusion that a beautician is a “seller” under § 402A and is irrelevant to the inquiry in the present case.
Section 402A by its own terms addresses the issue of the liability of one who “sells” a defective product to a “consumer.” Comment 1, however, does not purport to clarify who is a “seller,” but only to identify who may be a “user or consumer”: “consumption includes all ultimate uses for which the product is intended, and the customer in a beauty shop to whose hair a permanent wave solution is applied by the shop is a consumer.” § 402A Restatement of Torts, Second, comment 1 (emphasis added). Although the comment suggests that the person to whose hair the wave solution is applied may sue under § 402A, the comment does not suggest from whom the customer may recover for the “defective product.”
The dispositive issue in the present case is not whether the appellant is a consumer, but whether the hospital is a “seller” of the defective product. Since comment 1 sheds no light on this pertinent question, in my opinion it is inapplicable here.