holding that apportioning liability among defendants on a comparative fault basis is not precluded under the state’s 28 contribution statutes
How later courts described this case
- holding that apportioning liability among defendants on a comparative fault basis is not precluded under the state’s 28 contribution statutes
- applying principles of comparative negligence to apportion responsibility between a strictly liable defendant and a negligent defendant, as well as between multiple negligent defendants
- permitting a supermarket liable for negligence to seek contribution from a company held strictly liable for the manufacture of a defective shopping cart
- extending allocation of fault among tortfeasors to cases where one defendant liable in negligence and the other in strict liability
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
MOSK, J.
I dissent.
The majority take one more step toward the total infusion of negligence theories into the previously independent doctrine of products liability. As I feared when a narrow majority of the court strayed from principle in Daly v. General Motors Corp. (1978) 20 Cal.3d 725, 757 [ 144 Cal.Rptr. 380 , 575 P.2d 1162 ], the “pure concept of products liability so pridefully fashioned and nurtured by this court for the past decade and a half is reduced to a shambles.”
In Daly the manufacturer that launched the defective product into the stream of commerce was able to dilute its responsibility by placing in *336 issue the conduct of the plaintiff. Now the majority allow the manufacturer additional dilution: to also place in issue the conduct of other defendants.
This trend can have no result other than to emasculate the doctrine of strict products liability. Indeed, in practice negligence and strict products liability are becoming virtually indistinguishable, a result long resisted by courts concerned with protection of consumers, and a result long sought by manufacturers and insurance carriers. In accomplishing that purpose this court has repudiated the lesson of Justice Traynor who, when he developed the new tort in Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc. (1963) 59 Cal.2d 57, 63 [ 27 Cal.Rptr. 697 , 377 P.2d 897 , 13 A.L.R.3d 1049 ], wrote that “[t]he purpose of such liability is to insure that the costs of injuries resulting from defective products are borne by the manufacturers that put such products on the market....”
Bird, C. J., concurred.