tal cost shifts. The intention of the court is to shift risk away from customers and to those in the chain of distribution who, theoretically, can better handle the risk. Fault and standards of care in production and distribution have become secondary considerations.
Product liability litigation has caused much controversy in recent years because of the shift in considerations. The controversy surfaced on Capitol Hill throughout the 1980s due to increasing pressure to change the system. From 1974 through 1985
stated the number of product liability suits filed in federal district courts alone increased from under 2,000 to over 15,000 and the average jury award to a plaintiff tripled to exceed $1 million. However, the General Accounting office concluded that appeals reduce the size of the average award by 43 percent and that only 40 cents on the dollar expended in product liability suits reach the victim. Furthermore, several corporations and products have disappeared from the marketplace because of adverse product liability decisions. According to a Commerce Department study, 36 percent of manufacturers have stopped making certain products because of product liability litigation awards. In addition, the cost of liability insurance has risen five-fold in ten years.
The Reagan administration attempted to alleviate the "product liability crisis" by rewriting tort law. This proposal failed because it called for an absolute cap on non-economic damages (pain and suffering) and a cap on attorney's fees. The Bush administration, in its pursuit of reform, aims to provide uniformity in tort law in all states, speed up product liability disputes by keeping them out of the courts, restrict statutes of limitations, abolish joint and several liability for non-economic damages, limit a manufacturer's responsibility to its fair proportion of a claim, restrict punitive damages, and restrict awards to claimants whose injuries result...