Liability of the aircraft manufacturer.

The present law governing the liability of manufacturers to make reparation for harm caused by defects, attributable to negligence, in their products has been hammered out over a period of rather more than a century by the courts which, on both sides of the Atlantic, administer the principles of the Anglo-American system, and finds its origin in an English case, Winterbottom v. Wright (1). The sole parallel between this case and those immediately concerning the aircraft manufacturer is that both are derived from allegedly defective vehicles: for the rest, Winterbottom v. Wright did not involve a manufacturer, and was not tried on the issue of the tort of negligence. Its importance in the law of products liability, and the solution to the paradox, lie not in what was decided in the case but in the misinterpretation of the decision by later courts, and in their application of that misinterpretation to cases which were properly based on the tort of negligence