Explain the theory of market share liability

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

When injuries from a product show up 10 or 20 years after exposure to a defective product, even if the injury can be traced to the defective product, the plaintiffs cannot always trace the product to any particular manufacturer. If a number of manufacturers produced the same product, the plaintiff may have no idea whose product was used, and may even have used more than one manufacturer's product. In this situation, the courts have to balance the interests of the plaintiffs in recovering for injuries caused by defective products against the manufacturer's interest in not being held liable for injuries caused by a product they did not produce. The primary means used to resolve this dilemma today is the market share theory, created in 1980 by the California Supreme Court in the case of Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories. In Sindell, the plaintiffs' mothers had taken a drug known as diethylstilbestrol (DES) during pregnancies that had occurred before the drug was banned. Because the drug had been produced 20 years before the plaintiffs suffered any effects from the drug their mothers had taken, it was impossible to trace the defective drug back to each manufacturer that had produced the drug that caused each individual's problems. To balance the competing interest of the victims, who had suffered injury from the drug, and the defendants, who did not want to be held liable for a drug they did not produce, the court allowed the plaintiffs to sue all of the manufacturers who had produced the drug at the time the plaintiffs' mothers used the drug. The judge then apportioned liability among the defendant-manufacturers on the basis of the share of the market they had held at the time the drug was produced.