Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. 24 Cal.2d 453, 150 P.2d 436 (1944), is a California Supreme Court decision involving injuries caused by Coca-Cola's bursting bottle. This is an important case in the development of the general law of product liability in the United States, not so much for the real majority opinion, but for the same opinion of California Supreme Court justice Roger Traynor.
Video Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co.
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Plaintiff Gladys Escola is a waiter in a restaurant. He placed Coca-Cola glass bottles when one of the bottles exploded spontaneously in his hand. He suffered five inches of wounds, which cut off the veins, nerves, and muscles of the thumb and palms.
The top of the bottle, with its lid, remains in his hand, and the bottom falls to the floor but does not break. The broken bottle was not produced at the trial, because the pieces were discarded by a restaurant employee not long after the accident. However, Escola describes the fragments, and the bottle diagram shows the location of the "fracture line", where the bottle breaks into two. One of Coca-Cola's delivery deliverers was summoned as a witness by the plaintiff, and he testified that he had seen another Coca-Cola bottle in the past explode and had found broken bottles in the warehouse when he pulled out the cases but he did. not knowing what made them explode.
Escola was represented in the trial by legendary litigator Melvin Belli, then in the early stages of his career. He later admitted in his own autobiography that he did not fully understand that it would be a landmark case of a wide range. The jury returned the verdict to the plaintiff, following the docs of the lo Ãsa loquitur .
Maps Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co.
The majority opinion
Justice Phil S. Gibson confirmed the lower court's decision. He stated that although the instrument that caused the injury was not under the exclusive control of the defendant at the time of the accident, the defendant had control when the alleged negligence occurred (filling the broken bottle).
Upon examination of the record, the evidence seems to be sufficient to support the reasonable conclusion that the bottle here involved was not damaged by foreign powers after delivery to the restaurant by the defendant. Therefore, that bottle was in some way defective at the time the defendant relinquished the control, because the sounds and bottles are properly prepared carbonated fluid does not usually explode when handled with care. [ Escola , 24 Cal.2d at 459]
Moreover, although the defendant produced evidence to refute the conclusion of the negligence that arose after the application of the doctrine of the loquitur ipsa by discussing its security testing procedures, Gibson decided that the question was properly filed to the jury. and does not change the jury's verdict.
Concurring opinion
Judge Roger Traynor approved the ruling but argued that instead of deciding the case by reason of negligence, strict liability rules must be imposed on producers whose products cause injury to consumers. Based on many reasons in previous cases (especially MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co.), Traynor argues that public policy demands "that responsibility be improved wherever it will effectively reduce the dangers to life and health attached to a defective product that reaches the market. "He feels that the producer is better prepared to handle the costs of injury than the individual consumer, and he notes that California state law already implements strict liability rules for food makers causing illness or injury.
Traynor also feels that majority reasoning approaches strict rules of responsibility even though the decision is based on the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur :
By allowing him to the jury to decide whether the conclusions have been omitted, regardless of the evidence against it, the rules of neglect approach the strict rules of accountability. There is no need to go around in order to make negligence the basis of recovery and impose what is actually a responsibility without negligence. If public policy requires the producer of goods to be responsible for its quality regardless of the reason for not fixing that responsibility openly. 24 Cal.2d at 463.
Traynor also writes that the nature of modern systems of mass production and distribution of goods makes it difficult or impossible for consumers to check and verify that the products they buy are safe or to indicate that producers have been negligent. It makes strict liability a more practical standard.
Legacy
Today, Escola is widely recognized as an important case in American law and is a compulsory reading for first-year students in most American law schools. The reason is that in 1963, Traynor wrote a majority opinion, Greenman v. Yuba Power Products , 59 Cal. 2d 57 (1963), in which the Court finally adopted the rule he proposed 19 years earlier. In Greenman , Traynor writes: "We do not need to reassemble the rationale for applying strict liability to producers They have been fully articulated in the cited cases." Of course, among those cases is his own volition in Escola . Because Traynor is included, by reference, the discussion itself in Escola , two cases are usually assigned and discussed together.
References
External links
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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