A company is guilty of negligence when it fails to use reasonable care in
the design and manufacture of a product. Within the doctrine of
negligence, the manufacturer could not be sued if a consumer
misused/abused the product or caused injury to himself but the product
performed as intended (no product defect). During the sixties and
seventies consumer advocates believed the consumer was not being
adequately protected from product deficiencies. The result was the
creation of the doctrine of strict product liability, which switched the
focus of liability law from the manufacturer to the product. If an injury
occurs due to a defect, the manufacturer can be held liable, regardless of
when the product was manufactured, the use or abuse of the product, or
whether the manufacturer used the state-of-the-art technology at the
time of production.

The concept of Strict Product Liability (SPL) means, therefore, the
product can be built according to the highest quality specification,
have no manufacturing defect, and operate according to industry or
government mandated standards but if it causes an injury, the company
can still be held responsible. According to this concept, if the
manufacturer issued insufficient instructions on how to use the product or
issued inadequate warnings about its possible risks, the responsibility
would still be with the manufacturer. Under the domain of strict
liability, almost anyone who comes in contact with a product--designer,
manufacturer, distributor, or retailer--can be held personally liable if
the product was determined to be defective--unreasonably dangerous
when sold. To add complexity, all parties are potentially subject not
to a single standard of product liability but to one for each of the fifty

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