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Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
A Revisionist History Of Products Liability, Alexandra D. Lahav
A Revisionist History Of Products Liability, Alexandra D. Lahav
Michigan Law Review
Increasingly courts, including the Supreme Court, rely on ossified versions of the common law to decide cases. This Article demonstrates the risks of this use of the common law. The main contribution of the Article is to demonstrate that the traditional narrative about early products law—that manufacturers were not liable for injuries caused by their products because the doctrine of privity granted producers immunity from suit by the ultimate consumers of their goods—is incorrect. Instead, the doctrinal rule was negligence liability for producers of injurious goods across the United States in the nineteenth century. Courts routinely ignored or rejected privity …
Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage Of The Public Service Corporation, Evelyn Atkinson
Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage Of The Public Service Corporation, Evelyn Atkinson
Michigan Law Review
At the turn of the twentieth century, state courts were roiled by claims against telegraph corporations for mental anguish resulting from the failure to deliver telegrams involving the death or injury of a family member. Although these “telegraph cases” at first may seem a bizarre outlier, they in fact reveal an important and understudied moment of transformation in the nature of the relationship between the corporation and the public: the role of affective relations in the development of the category of the public utility corporation. Even as powerful corporations were recast as private, rights-bearing, profit-making market actors in constitutional law, …