I caught this little item on Overlawyered, which got it from Jack Bog’s blog .
A company called May Trucking owned a Paccar tractor-trailer for six years, driving it about half a million miles. They then sold the Paccar to another person who sold it to Lewis Farms. A year after May Trucking sold it, the tractor-trailer lost its wheels (due to axle failure) while driving down the highway. It crashed into a driver and injured him badly.
The driver then sued Paccar, Lewis Farms and May Trucking. The complaint against May Trucking was that they failed to properly maintain the axle while they owned the vehicle and therefore they were negligent and partially responsible for the accident.
May Trucking argued in court that it couldn’t be responsible because they sold the truck a year before the accident. The court (Multnomah County Circuit Court, Oregon) ruled that if it could be proven that May was negligent, they too could be held responsible for the accident.
Now, IANAL, but I find this somewhat disturbing. May had sold the truck a year before. Even if they never did a day’s maintenance on the truck, the fact is that the current operator was Lewis, and it’s Lewis’ responsibility to see to it that the vehicle is safe before it’s allowed out on the road. By the time of the accident, May had no control of the truck for over 12 months, certainly long enough for the vehicle to be inspected by Lewis to ensure safety.
At what point should a person’s liability end for items that are no longer in their possession. If I sell my house and two years later someone is injured in it, should that be my responsibility? If I own a dog and sell him and two years later he bites someone, will the bitten party come after me and say that the bite was due to trauma the dog suffered in puppyhood?
In short, what (if any) limits should there be on legal liability for damages on something that you no longer own and can no longer control.
I would say that May Trucking were liable if they’d faked up or lied about the maintenance of the truck, or if it could be proved that the truck was also a danger when they had it (assuming there’s a law about that). But I would say that the current owners were liable either way, since they had plenty of time to get it checked out and fixed. That’s just an opinion and I don’t know anything about the legal aspect.
I think the difference is like this; if I went to sell my car, parked it at the top of a hill with the brake off (accidentally), and sold it whilst it was halfway down, is the new owner liable for the crash? No, because they didn’t know about it and didn’t have time to do anything about it. But if they do, then sure, they’re liable.
Heck, if the court was going to let the plantiff go back that far searching for deep pockets, why not go all the way back to the manufacturer of the truck?
This is a legal term of art. Negligence entails:
Duty
Breach
Cause
Proximate Cause
Damages
That means if the plaintiff can PROVE that the defendant had a DUTY and that he BREACHED that DUTY and that said BREACH was BOTH the CAUSE and PROXIMATE CAUSE of the DAMAGES claimed then that defendant is liable for negligence.
I don’t have enough facts to answer any of those questions. If the plaintiff can establish negligence should he not prevail. FTR it is most likely that this plaintiff will fail to establish either Duty or Proximate Cause as to this defendant.
Aren’t trucks machines? And if machines are not maintained, they do wear out. Plus, what about the state that certified the truck? Did they note any dangerous conditions? It’s like a building-the Empire State Building is now 70+ years old-is it reasonable to think that it might need some maintainence? Frankly, things like this don’t make much sense-we do safety checks to see that dangerous vehicles get repaired. Why add the expense of lawsuits?
IANAL (or a big truck mechanic) but if it is standard in the industry that certain maintenance be performed at certain mileage intervals and this maintenance wasn’t performed and the fact that it wasn’t performed was not revealed to the buyer, then yeah I could see this being an issue.
There are things you can’t check with just a casual inspection, thats why they have maintenance schedules. Its not reasonable to assume that someone who buys a big rig is going to have the thing completely disassembled and inspected prior to putting it into service. It would cost more than just buying a new truck.
Then it’s also not reasonable to expect the previous owner to do the same. Expectation of maintenance I can see. But if this specific maintenance isn’t required by law, then IMO it’s up to the new buyer to make sure that it is safe for themselves or employees. If they fail to do that, they’re just as “liable” or “negligent” for any problems encountered.
Just one of the many uglies we have in America. Everybody is liable for everything.
Are you under the impression that manufacturers aren’t liable for the performance of their products, once they sell them? I submit that manufacturers are often held liable for products they build. In this case it does appear that the manufacturer, Paccar, is included in the suit.
If you were negligent, I don’t think that unloading the death-trap-to-be should be, by itself, an affirmative defense for your acts.
Until fairly recently aircraft manufacturers were liable for every aircraft they ever built. It took an Act of Congress to limit their liability to 18 years.
To further muddy the waters, what if May Trucking acknowledged that the truck was unsafe for road conditions and openly sold it in that condition? They could conceivably have told the buyer, “This truck is unsafe but we’d rather buy a new vehicle than spend the money repairing this old one. Make sure you fix the axles if you plan on driving it on the highway.” And then suppose the new driver decided to put it on the road without doing the repairs. Would May Trucking be liable for not maintaining the vehicle and knowingly selling an unsafe vehicle? Or would they be not liable because they had declared the information to the new owner and passed the liability on to him? Suppose instead of giving specific information about the axles, they had just told the buyer, “You’re buying this as is. It probably needs a lot of repairs before it’s safe for the road.”?
Sure, but that doesn’t mean it will survive a motion for summary judgement. Or do you suggest there is some way for courts to dismiss frivolous complaints before they review them to determine they are in fact frivolous.
This doesn’t seem big a deal to me. The plaintiffs or cross plaintiffs whoever brought them in have a long way to go to prove the original owners were negligent. And maybe they were. This stuff happens all the time in civil suits.
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It is in the fact the law that commercial vehicle operators must establish, and adhere to, a preventive maintenance schedule. Furthermore, all jusrisdictions in North America require at least one full safety inspection per year, which, from what I have seen, always includes a visual inspection of the axles. All maintenance done on the vehicle, including inspections, must be documented by date and odometer reading.
It is simply inconceivable that the vehicle was properly maintained and inspected in the year prior to the accident. That can’t happen without it being previously noticeable. Unless the truck was doing a Blues Brothers stunt, axles don’t just snap like carrots.
I don’t want to get into the complexities of negligence law here, so let’s try a different tack.
I’m going to start with the assumption that we all want to minimize occurences where a truck driving down the highway pops a wheel and injures someone. I’m also going to assume that we want to do this in the cheapest way possible.
If those assumptions are true, then you want to put the onus on prevention on the person(s) who are able to avoid the risk of injury in the cheapest fashion possible. It may very well be that the final owner is the person who can do this. But it may also be that if the entire chain of owners follows a proper maintenance schedule, then we’ve acheived the cheapest way to minimize risk.
If it is the case that the cheapest way to avoid risk is to have the entire chain of owners perform maintenance, then the way you achieve that using the tort system is to penalize any owner who didn’t do the maintenance.
An important aspect of the particular case that Zev cited is that it was a motion for pre-trial judgment, not a final judgment. Negligence suits depend heavily on the particular facts of the case. For the original owner of the truck to succeed in getting the suit dismissed, it would have had to convice the court that there were no conceivable facts which would show that it had been negligent, or alternatively, that there was an absolute rule that a previous owner of a vehicle could never be liable once title had passed. Those are both pretty hard arguments to make in th absence of any evidence. (And the usual rule on pre-trial motions to strike is that the court has to assume that eveything in the other side’s pleadings is true, so if the plaintiff has alleged conduct that points to negligence by the previous owner, that is the factual basis that the court relies on in dealing with the defendant’s motion to strike.)
As various posters have suggested, it is possible to imagine circumstances where the previous owner may have been negligent. A court is normally reluctant to decide a case on a pre-trial motion to strike, and essentially say that in no conceivable case could the previous owner have been negligent.
That’s what trials are for - to determine the boundaries of unacceptable conduct, based on actual facts.
Sure MAY TRUCKING may have thought the truck was ready for the junkyard-but didn’t the new owner have to have the truck inspected and certified? Used cars come with tons of defects-that is why state governments require vehicle safety inspections.