Inadequate Security
Sometimes a defendant can be liable for injuries incurred by a plaintiff as the result of inadequate security. Some common examples include plaintiffs being attacked by criminals in parking lots of stores, parking garages, bars, night clubs and common areas (stairways, hallways, courtyards) of apartment buildings.
Cases of this type commonly rely on a theory that the area where the plaintiff was attacked was an area known for criminal activity and as such the landowner had a duty to take steps to prevent people from being attacked in those areas.
Some typical claims made by plaintiffs are that the defendant failed to provide adequate lighting, fencing, doors, locks or even security guards. If the plaintiff can prove that under the circumstances the defendant had a duty to take such steps and did not, then the plaintiff might be successful.
Falling Items
Shopowners can often be liable for injuries to patrons caused by items falling from shelves. Assuming the patron did not pull the item down on top of them, it should be pretty easy to prove negligence. Presumably items do not ordinarily fall off shelves if properly placed.
Swimming Pools
Swimming pool owners are often the subject of lawsuits for injuries or deaths caused by people falling in the water. Typical negligence theories include that the area around the pool was unreasonably slippery or that there was not adequate fencing around the pool to keep children and others away from the pool. Another type of liability, especially for commercial pool owners such as at hotels or public pools, involves claims of inadequate supervision by lifeguards which leads to patrons in the pool being injured or drowning.
Injuries from Defective Products
A great many of the class action lawsuits that you hear about on the news result from injuries caused by defective products. There are many different types of cases that fall into this category. Some of the more common types of defective product cases involve injuries caused by the following situations: when a machine breaks during use; failure to include safety features on a product which could have prevented injuries (such as a guard on a lawn mower); food poisoning; injuries caused by inadequately tested or abnormally dangerous medications; and defects in cars.
The actual law of product liability is quite complicated, even for law students. As such, I will summarize the basic ideas, but do not be concerned if you do not fully understand. Product liability law can be generally broken down into two types: negligence and warranty/strict liability. In many cases, a lawsuit will allege both of these types against the defendant, as more than one may apply. Let’s look at each type individually.
Product Liability/Negligence
We have already learned that most personal injury lawsuits are based on negligence and what the elements required to prove a negligence claim are. In a product liability case, you are simply claiming that the manufacturer or distributor of a product committed some act of negligence that led to the defect and therefore the injury.
You must show a duty and a breach of the duty. For example, suppose that a manufacturer of a power saw negligently fails to tighten a bolt on a saw. The duty was to tighten the bolt, the breach was in not tightening the bolt.
When the ultimate customer uses the saw, the blade comes loose and injures him hence causation and injury. The customer can sue the manufacturer for negligently causing the injury by not tightening the bolt.
As you will see as you read further, unlike in warranty/strict liability type cases, in a negligence type product liability case, you can only sue whoever was negligent. Thus, in our saw case, if the store that sold the saw did not do anything negligent with regard to the saw, then the injured customer could not sue the store for negligence, he or she could only sue the manufacturer.