Analyze and discuss - Essay Example

Liability Law and Regulation Certain laws and amendments regarding product efficiency and safety are created to protect the consumers as well as the manufacturers from harm of merchandise misuse. Safety standards are imposed to avoid the usual consumer issues like buying defective items in the market, incurring damage or injuries from using specific manufactured goods and suffering adverse health effects sustained with the use or ingestion of products, among others. Hence, manufacturers, distributors, and any entity that sell the product to the public are held accountable for the quality of the item and any damages that it may cause to the person that will buy it.

Calabresi and Melamed supported the Coase theorem by establishing the principles for the assignment of costs and the choice between liability and regulation. Simply put in context, it means that a particular product in the market is subject to the manufacturer’s liability or under a government regulation, whichever is deemed efficient to the buying public. The safety of the product and the probable effect that it may bring to the consumer must be identified, if not, liability rules, government regulation and standards must be developed in order to properly gauge the costs against the benefits (p. 281). The law of product liability involves the responsibility of manufacturers and sellers of products regarding warranty, strict liability, and negligence and consumer protection.

Warranty embraces those “expressly made by the producer and those implied by” (p. 283). The written obligations of the producer to a particular product pertain to express warranty, while implied warranty includes the indirect commitment of the producer to the merchantability or fitness of the product. Additionally, the complex law of contracts and warranties was improved to the present-day law of products liability. First, it stretched the concept of identifying who the aggrieved party may be and some principles of the tort law were also used to issues that include damages incurred in using merchandise (p.283). Hence, manufacturers continue to generate new innovations in warning and increasing the consumer’s awareness about the products they sell since the social cost for such defects are too high.

In the Restatement (Third) of Torts, specific types of liability claims have been added such as manufacturing defect, design defect and failure to warn or marketing defects (p. 282). Furthermore, certain products are subject to regulation and standards depending on the extent of the possible damage that it may bring if not properly used. Liability to defects is not enough at some point and therefore the product should follow strict parameters. By constructing choices on how to deal with assignment of entitlements, social efficiency is then attainable by producers.

The evolution of the legal framework in establishing more extensive and reasonable laws on liability and regulation clearly lessens the social cost to both manufacturers and consumers. Upon proper application of the tort principles and by following the current product liability law, producers are absolutely provides an alternative to expensive governing bodies. Work Cited Viscusi, W. Kip. Reforming Products Liability. Harvard University Press. 1991. Print.