Court Opinion

ID: 9444867
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:14:50.458574+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:02.807649
License: Public Domain

MAGRUDER, Chief Judge
(concurring).
I concur in the opinion and judgment of the court.
It is undisputed that under the substantive law of Nebraska a manufacturer owes a duty of ordinary care to remote but foreseeable users of his manufactured products, and is liable to such users for harm proximately caused by the manufacturer’s negligence. If suit had been brought in a Massachusetts state court on this alleged Nebraska tort, no doubt the Massachusetts courts would apply the foregoing substantive law of Nebraska. See Peterson v. Boston & Maine R. R., 1941, 310 Mass. 45, 36 N.E. 2d 701. Judge Woodbury’s opinion has found indications in the Massachusetts decisions that in such a suit, without regard to whether a Nebraska court would do the same thing, the Massachusetts courts would apply a “presumption,” regarded by them as a rule of local procedure, that the manufacturer who puts the component parts together must be taken to know the nature and quality of the resultant product which he solicits the public to purchase. By this is meant not a conclusive or irrebuttable presumption, which becomes a rule of substantive law (see Am.L.Inst., Rest. of Conflicts § 595, Comment c; Peterson v. Boston & Maine R. R., 1941, 310 Mass. 45, 47, 36 N.E.2d 701), but that such knowledge is a “compelled inference” in the event that the manufacturer fails to discharge his burden of “going forward with evidence” tending to show that he neither knew, nor in the exercise of care would have discovered, by preliminary *852tests or inspections, the potentially dangerous character of the manufactured product. Such was the situation in the case at bar, where the defendant did not go forward with any evidence of an exculpatory nature. The manufacturer in that situation is treated as if he knew, that is, he is “charged with knowledge,” for by force of the presumption it must be taken that he actually knew, or in the exercise of due care would have discovered, the dangerous properties of his product before putting it on the market. Judge Woodbury’s opinion also concludes that a federal district court sitting in Massachusetts in a diversity of citizenship case such as this would be bound to apply the rule of presumption which the Massachusetts state courts would apply, even though the state courts for their own purposes might classify such presumption as a local rule of “procedure.” See Boyle v. Ward, 3 Cir., 1942, 125 F.2d 672.
I assume that Judge Woodbury’s opinion is right in the foregoing respects, but since the subject matter is certainly a difficult and cloudy one I should like to add an additional comment which tends to support the court’s conclusion that the judgments for the plaintiff, now on appeal, should be affirmed. If Judge Wood-bury’s opinion is correct, the plaintiff below was entitled to a binding instruction that Sylvania must be taken to have known that the powdered beryllium with which it coated its glass tubing might cause a lung disease to artisans making the ordinary and expectable use of the product. The district court gave no such binding instruction, but the error, if it was an error, has become harmless tc the plaintiff in view of the fact that the jury brought in a plaintiff's verdict anyway.
In the charge to the jury the district court said that a manufacturer who produces an article that is inherently dangerous “is presumed to know the nature and quality of the product and its component parts; and if he or it knew or should have known the product was inherently dangerous, the manufacturer owed a legal duty to use reasonable care to prevent injury to those whom he knows or has reason to know will use or come in contact with the product.” By this I take it the district court merely meant that it was permissible for the jury to infer as a fact, on the preponderance of probabilities, that the manufacturer knew or should have known the dangerous character of its product. I say this because later in the charge the district court distinctly left it to the jury to determine as a fact whether the defendant knew or should have known by the exercise of reasonable care “that the tubes were inherently dangerous, namely that the powder particles of the tubes would slough off in their use and the powder content, beryllium, * * * was poisonous.” The jury were told that it was for them to resolve that question. “If the defendant did not know or should not have known by the exercise of reasonable care, the plaintiff cannot recover, as it is the plaintiff’s burden of proof to prove that the defendant knew or should have known.”
In other words, all that the court below did was to apply to the situation the familiar rule of res ipsa loquitur in the simple form of a permissible, but not a compelled, inference. See Sweeney v. Erving, 1913, 228 U.S. 233, 240, 33 S.Ct. 416, 57 L.Ed. 815; United States v. Hull, 1 Cir., 1952, 195 F.2d 64, 66. The Massachusetts state courts would certainly have gone this far, and I take it also that the Nebraska courts would have done so, even though they might not have applied a rule of “presumption,”, that is, a compelled inference of knowledge in the absence of exculpatory evidence offered by the manufacturer. See Miratsky v. Beseda, 1941, 139 Neb. 299, 297 N.W. 94; Security Ins. Co. v. Omaha Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 1954, 157 Neb. 923, 62 N.W.2d 127; Benedict v. Eppley Hotel Co., 1954, 159 Neb. 23, 65 N.W.2d 224. And see Note, The Procedural Effect of Res Ipsa Loquitur in Nebraska, 1954, 33 Neb.L.Rev. 620.