# Safeway Stores, Inc. v. Nest-Kart

> California Supreme Court · May 26, 1978 · 21 Cal. 3d 322

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9624488

## Case

- **Full name:** SAFEWAY STORES, INC., Cross-Complainant and Respondent, v. NEST-KART, Cross-Defendant and Appellant
- **Court:** California Supreme Court
- **Decided:** May 26, 1978
- **Citations:** 21 Cal. 3d 322; 146 Cal. Rptr. 550; 579 P.2d 441; 1978 Cal. LEXIS 233
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Dissent by Mosk
- **Judges:** Tobriner, Clark, Mosk
- **Cited by:** 111 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- No negative treatment found by the automated citator. That is not the same as a confirmation that the case is good law; read the citing cases.
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9624488

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- 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

## Opinion text

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.

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9624488. Public record. Not legal advice.