Article by Paul N. Wonacott
Development of products liability in admiralty law governing shipbuilders and repairers has been deliberate and cautious. Traditional restraint in fashioning substantive maritime rules from common law, coupled with the revered goal of uniformity, has created a body of federal maritime law that is slowly gaining definition.
Formal adoption of the broad shoreside principles of products liability occurred in June of 1986 when the Supreme Court in East River Steamship Corp. v. Transamerica Delaval, Inc. noted the virtual unanimity of viewpoint in federal decisions and commentaries over the past twenty years. The Court recognized consistent application in lower federal courts of the rules set out in section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts. Indeed, uniformity had practically occurred without help from the Court. The final imprimatur seemed a long time coming.
The slow pace of admiralty courts had been set decades before. It is illustrative that the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Sieracki v. Seas Shipping Co. decided in 1945 that privity requirements in a negligence action were as out of place at the Bethlehem shipyard as they had been almost thirty years earlier at the Buick Motor Company. Then, in due course came the implied warranties that invaded admiralty not by sea or even by land, but by air. For a bothersome period of time admiralty courts became preoccupied with jurisdictional issues while common law courts continued to move briskly into strict tort principles as enunciated by the Restatement (Second).
What has emerged, however, is durable doctrine just now coming of age. This Article examines that doctrine and focuses predominantly on federal and some state courts' decisions applying federal maritime law. Although current developments in shoreside law will be grist for admiralty at a later date, no significant attempt is made now to project shoreside trends or to predict which rules admiralty might fashion by reference to state decisional and statutory law. Some excellent comprehensive works, as well as existing and proposed legislation, are available to help identify those trends.
This Article is limited to admiralty development of products liability theories of negligence and strict tort under section 402A. Theories of warranty liability are not discussed. The importance of implied warranty precedent in admiralty is becoming mostly historical.
Warranty theories were introduced into admiralty by the aircraft cases involving DOHSA claims during the pre-Executive Jet era when admiralty tort jurisdiction rested on locality alone. During that time, admiralty courts puzzled over threshold jurisdictional questions of whether the products claim sounded in tort or in contract. That development is necessary for the complete picture but is beyond the scope of this Article.
About the Author
Paul N. Wonacott. Partner, Wood Tatum Mosser Brooke & Landis, Portland, Oregon; LL.B. 1965, Stanford Law School.
Citation
62 Tul. L. Rev. 465 (1988)