Law Commons^™

The Useful Life Defense: Embracing The Idea That All Products Eventually Grow Old And Die, Charles E. Cantú

Faculty Articles

To date, no jurisdiction has adopted the useful life defense as part of its common law. Perhaps the time has come to reconsider this position and accept the logical consequences of such a defensive concept. At some point, natural deterioration, rather than a defect in design, manufacturing, or marketing, is the cause of a plaintiff’s injury. Combining the useful life defense with the reasonable expectation theory removes the burden of uniformly determining when a given product is legally dead. The reasonable expectations doctrine places the responsibility for determining the useful life of a product where it belongs—in the hands of …