If you’ve been injured by a defective product, you might base your claim requesting financial compensation for your injuries on several legal theories.
1. Negligence (if, for instance, the manufacturer failed to adequately test a product before sending it to market);
2. Strict liability (if the product was inherently dangerous – perhaps from a design defect); or
3. Breach of the Warranty of Fitness (if the product was not fit for the purpose for which it was intended).
No matter which of these legal options you choose for your claim, you WILL need to prove that the product was defective and that it was defective when it left the control of the defendant. (In other words, the product did not become defective because you altered or misused it.) The product defect might be:
1. A design defect (something about the design was flawed and made the product inherently dangerous to use);
2. A manufacturing defect (something went wrong during the making of the product, and probably only some of the products were subject to this defect); or
3. A marketing defect (the instructions for use were wrong, or the warning labels were inadequate).
Defective product liability law resides in Texas common law (case law) and the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), which Texas follows. Texas has also adopted product defect strict liability.
When you choose a legal theory to form the basis of your claim, you need to make sure that you have the right theory for the facts and circumstances of your case. Strict liability may seem an easy choice at first, because you don’t need to prove fault. But strict liability financial recoveries might be strictly limited in financial recovery amounts too.
Negligence can provide substantial financial recoveries for the victim, but you can’t always prove negligence. Manufacturers, designers, and marketers might have taken every available precaution based on the best knowledge available at the time, but something still went wrong.
Breach of the Warranty of Fitness often applies. If you were injured because of a product defect during the normal course of using that product, it almost certainly was not fit for irs intended purpose. But it can be hard to establish that you did not contribute to the injury by misusing or altering the product. And use of inherently dangerous products like explosives really present some evidentiary difficulties for you.