Law Commons^™

Who Sells? Testing Amazon.Com For Product Defect Liability In Pennsylvania And Beyond, Aaron Doyer

Journal of Law and Policy

Pennsylvania, like other states, has struggled over the past few decades to apply the policy principles of product defect law—a tort characterized by strict liability. Because strict liability bypasses the traditional requirement in tort that a plaintiff prove the defendant’s negligence, and instead requires only a showing that the plaintiff was injured by a product sold in a defective condition, these inquiries raise a deceptively simple question: who sells? Recently, in a landmark case in Pennsylvania, the Third Circuit made waves by declaring Amazon.com, an enormous online marketplace, the legal “seller” of a product shipped and sold by a vendor …