Court Opinion

ID: 9486140
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:38:54.674051+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:32.677524
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Chief Judge,
with whom MANION and KANNE, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting in part.
I agree that the plaintiffs claim of inadequate warnings should be dismissed, but I would go on and resolve the rest of the case along the lines proposed by Judge Manion. To certify abstract questions about the “consumer-contemplation test” and the “risk-utility test” to the state supreme court is to misunderstand the nature of common law adjudication.
Judges lack many things that legislators have, but one thing we have is first-hand experience with the facts crystallized in adversary litigation. In areas where the making of substantive rules — “legislating,” in a sense — is left to judges, it is because the experience generated by the hearing of cases is thought an adequate or even a superior substitute for the sources of information and persuasion to which legislators turn (or are turned). Common law rules and principles well up out of the judges’ experience with the facts of actual cases and are honed by the experience of encountering different facts in later cases.
This court is requesting the Supreme Court of Illinois to make rules applicable to all “non-purchasers” of dangerous or defective products and to “all consumer products whose risk can be appreciated by their intended users.” But this is not a case about all non-purchasers or about all consumer products the risks of which are comprehensible by their intended users. It is a case about a small child who used á cigarette lighter to set a fire that killed another small child. The only issue we ought to be concerned with is whether the state supreme court would permit such a case to go to a jury. I say — with diffidence, in view of the disagreement within our court — that the answer is fairly clearly “no.” As is plain from the long footnote in the majority opinion, the respective costs and benefits of child-resistant cigarette fighters raise difficult questions that a jury could not responsibly answer, and underneath them is the broader question how far, and through what institutional means, society should go to make ordinary household products child-proof (or child-resistant). If fighters are to be made child-proof, can kitchen knives, microwave ovens, and electrical sockets be far behind? *1226Is a comprehensive national program of protecting children from the menaces of everyday life to be formulated and administered by — juries?
These issues are obscured by this pair of certified questions neither of which mentions children, lighters, or household products, thus inviting abstract answers that may not attend sufficiently to the particularity of this case or even of the class of cases to which it belongs. Of course the Supreme Court of Illinois is not required to answer our questions, Citizens for John W. Moore Party v. Board of Election Commissioners, 94 Ill.Dec. 69, 487 N.E.2d 946 (1986) (per curiam); and we give it leave to reformulate them and we send it the record as well and it could I suppose restate our questions simply as, Should the district court be affirmed? But the purpose of the certification procedure is not to dump our cases, even our diversity cases, on state courts. Kidney by Kidney v. Kolmar Laboratories, Inc., 808 F.2d 955, 957 (2d Cir.1987); Dorman v. Satti 862 F.2d 432, 435 (2d Cir.1988); cf. Doe v. American National Red Cross, 976 F.2d 372, 374 (7th Cir.1992). That would convert certification to abstention, and there is no suggestion that this is an appropriate case for abstention. Cf. Lehman Bros. v. Schein, 416 U.S. 386, 393, 94 S.Ct. 1741, 1745, 40 L.Ed.2d 215 (1974) (concurring opinion). The purpose of certification is to identify controlling issues that can be resolved without immersion in the details of the case. Doe v. American National Red Cross, supra, 976 F.2d at 374; Woodbridge Place Apartments v. Washington Square Capital, Inc., 965 F.2d 1429, 1434 (7th Cir.1992); Diginet, Inc. v. Western Union ATS, Inc., 958 F.2d 1388, 1395 (7th Cir.1992); see generally 17A Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Edward H. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 4248 (1988). There are many such questions, for example the question of statutory interpretation posed in our most recent certification to the Supreme Court of Illinois, DeGrand v. Motors Ins. Corp., 903 F.2d 1100, 1104 (7th Cir.1990), but the ones put by the majority in this case are not among them. Certification is rarely if ever appropriate in a fact-laden common law case, such as this.
I do not think we need worry that since there are no lighter manufacturers in Illinois we shall be draining all the lighter litigation from the Illinois state courts unless we certify these questions. Plaintiffs in product liability cases frequently join local dealers or distributors as additional defendants along with the manufacturer, thus destroying diversity; and decisions in Illinois eases in which children injure children with other household products might provide definitive guidance to federal courts in lighter litigation. There are plenty of reported Illinois cases involving manufacturers’ liability for product injuries to children. See, e.g., Cozzi v. North Palos Elementary School District No. 117, 232 Ill.App.3d 379, 173 Ill.Dec. 709, 597 N.E.2d 683 (1992); Kempes v. Dunlop Tire & Rubber Corp., 192 Ill.App.3d 209, 139 Ill.Dec. 259, 548 N.E.2d 644 (1989). Some even involve children using products to injure other children. In one a seven year old ran over a four year old with a gasoline-powered lawnmower. Wenzell v. MTD Products, Inc., 32 Ill.App.3d 279, 336 N.E.2d 125 (1975). (As usual in these cases, the manufacturer won.) In the only other diversity case (besides the present case) in this fine, we had no difficulty resolving in favor of the manufacturer on the authority of previous decisions by the Illinois courts a case in which a lawn dart thrown by an eight year old had struck and grievously injured a two-and-a-half year old. First National Bank v. Regents Sports Corp., 803 F.2d 1431 (7th Cir.1986). Although lighters have been around for many years and the liberal regime of products liability is decades old, there is only one other reported case, state or federal, in Illinois dealing with a lighter injury inflicted by a child — and it was a toy lighter, and the case was brought and remained in state court, and the defendant won. Van Skike v. Zussman, 318 N.E.2d 244, 22 Ill.App.3d 1039 (1974).
There is little danger, therefore, that by deciding this case rather than bouncing it to the state supreme court (which may bounce it right back to us) we would be depriving the Illinois courts of their rightful control over the evolution of the common law of the state. The sparsity of lighter litigation in this state shows that a conventional ground for eertifi-*1227cation, the probability of recurrence, Kidney by Kidney v. Kolmar Laboratories, Inc., supra, 808 F.2d at 957, is, despite the majority’s expressed concern with “attract[ing] all future [lighter] cases” into the federal courts in this state, absent too. I grant that the panel’s 2-1 decision in favor of reversing the district judge’s grant of summary judgment was so unexpectedly favorable to plaintiffs in this class of case that it might unless vacated have exerted the attractive force that concerns my colleagues. But it was vacated when we granted rehearing en banc. I voted to rehear the case en banc; I think we should bite the bullet and decide it now. By certifying these questions to the Supreme Court of Illinois we merely delay the resolution of the case, impair the proper operation of the common law process, and burden another court.