Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century courts, in products liability actions, required the injured plaintiff to show privity of contract with the manufacturer and also to show the failure of the manufacturer to meet a standard of care. This doctrine protected the manufacturer at the expense of the victims of his mistakes. Later in the century the theory was modified so that plaintiff needed only to show a failure by the manufacturer to meet a standard of care in order to recover in a products liability action based on negligence. Today the trend in products liability is to do away with the requirement of showing a failure of care by the manufacturer in a negligence action and to make the manufacturer strictly liable in tort. if the case is sounded in warranty the trend is to do away with any requirement of privity between the injured plaintiff and the manufacturer and make him, as the courts have phrased it, strictly liable in warranty.

Arizona has seemingly joined this recent trend, as is evidenced by a concurring opinion in Nalbandian v. Byron Jackson Pumps, Inc. In the opinion it was said that, "A manufacturer is strictly liable in tort where an article he places on the market, knowing that it is to be used without inspection for defects, proves to have a defect that causes injury to a human being." The purposes of this comment are to set forth briefly the historical development of the various theories of products liability and to discuss the effect and impact of the trend toward strict liability.

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