Editing Product liability (section)

=====The mass tort product liability explosion=====

Early proponents of strict liability believed its economic impact would be minor because they were focused on manufacturing defects.<ref name="Stapleton_Page26">{{cite book |last1=Stapleton |first1=Jane |title=Product Liability |date=1994 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge |isbn=9780406035035 |page=26 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ohxyzSM76n8C&pg=PA26}}</ref> They failed to foresee the logical implications of applying the rule to other types of product defects.<ref name="Stapleton_Page26" />  Only in the late 1960s did Americans begin to draw a clear analytical distinction between manufacturing and design defects, and since the early 1980s, defective design claims "have formed the overwhelming bulk" of American product liability lawsuits.<ref name="Stapleton_Page30" />  It was "the unintended application of [Section] 402A to the design context" which resulted in the explosion of [[mass tort]] product liability cases during the 1980s throughout the United States.<ref name="Stapleton_Page30" /> In the [[Federal judiciary of the United States|federal judicial system]], the number of product liability civil actions filed per year increased from 2,393 in 1975 to 13,408 in 1989, and product liability's percentage of all federal civil cases increased from 2.0% to 5.7% during the same period.<ref name="Moore_Page10">{{cite book |last1=Moore |first1=Michael J. |last2=Viscusi |first2=W. Kip |title=Product Liability Entering the Twenty-First Century: The U.S. Perspective |date=2001 |publisher=AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies |location=Washington, D.C. |isbn=9780815798798 |page=10 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vayqFDPGVhsC&pg=PA10 |access-date=19 September 2020}}</ref>  These numbers reflect only a small portion of the 1980s explosion in product liability cases; the vast majority of American lawsuits are heard in state courts and not federal courts.<ref name="Manweller_Page55">{{cite book |last1=Manweller |first1=Mathew |editor1-last=Hogan |editor1-first=Sean O. |title=The Judicial Branch of State Government: People, Process, and Politics |date=2006 |publisher=ABC-CLIO |location=Santa Barbara |isbn=9781851097517 |pages=37–96 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ong5k8n97P4C&pg=PA55 |access-date=5 October 2020 |chapter=Chapter 2, The Roles, Functions, and Powers of State Courts}}</ref>

In subsequent decades, American federal judges began to heavily rely upon the [[multidistrict litigation]] (MDL) statute ({{usc|28|1407}}) to manage an ever-increasing number of complex civil cases.<ref name="Wittenberg">{{cite news |last1=Wittenberg |first1=Daniel S. |url=https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/publications/litigation-news/business-litigation/multidistrict-litigation-dominating-federal-docket/ |work=Litigation News |publisher=American Bar Association |date=February 19, 2020 |title=Multidistrict Litigation: Dominating the Federal Docket |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201021172757/https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/publications/litigation-news/business-litigation/multidistrict-litigation-dominating-federal-docket/ |archive-date=October 21, 2020 |url-status=dead}}</ref>  For the first time, by the end of 2018 more than half (51.9%) of all pending American federal civil cases had been centralized into MDLs, with 156,511 cases in 248 MDLs out of a total of 301,766 civil cases.<ref name="Wittenberg" />  Product liability was the dominant category both in terms of percentage of total active MDLs (32.9%) and percentage of total civil cases centralized into MDLs (91%).<ref name="Wittenberg" />

Among the factors which led to the large numbers of product liability cases seen today in the United States are relatively low fees for [[Filing (law)|filing]] lawsuits, the availability of [[class action]]s, the strongest right to a [[jury trial]] in the world, the highest awards of monetary damages in the world (frequently in the millions of dollars for [[pain and suffering]] noneconomic damages and in rare cases soaring into the billions for [[punitive damages]]<ref name="Priest_Page_1">{{cite book |last1=Priest |first1=George L. |author1-link=George L. Priest |editor1-last=Sunstein |editor1-first=Cass R. |editor2-last=Hastie |editor2-first=Reid |editor3-last=Payne |editor3-first=John W. |editor4-last=Viscusi |editor4-first=W. Kip |editor5-last=Schkade |editor5-first=David A. |editor1-link=Cass Sunstein |editor4-link=W. Kip Viscusi |title=Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide |date=2002 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |location=Chicago |isbn=9780226780160 |pages=1-16 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jd1F5Ep19UoC&pg=PA1 |chapter=Introduction: The Problem and Efforts to Understand It}} (At p. 1.)</ref>), and the most extensive right to [[Discovery (law)|discovery]] in the world.<ref name="Reimann_2003" />  No other country has adopted the U.S. standard of disclosure of information that is "reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence."<ref name="Reimann_2003" /><ref name="Sautter_Page20">{{cite book |last1=Sautter |first1=Ed |editor1-last=Coleman |editor1-first=Lynn |editor2-last=Lemieux |editor2-first=Victoria L. |editor3-last=Stone |editor3-first=Rod |editor4-last=Yeo |editor4-first=Geoffrey |title=Managing Records in Global Financial Markets: Ensuring Compliance and Mitigating Risk |date=2011 |publisher=Facet Publishing |location=London |isbn=9781856046633 |pages=17–32 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j9wqDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA20 |chapter=Chapter 2: Conflicts of laws in multiple jurisdictions}}</ref>  American [[Law report|reported cases]] are replete with plaintiffs whose counsel artfully exploited this standard to obtain so-called "[[smoking gun]]" evidence of product defects and made defendants pay "a tremendous price" for their callous disregard for product safety.<ref name="Reimann_2003" />