Product Liability In The AI Era

How the world is gearing up to handle harm caused by AI-powered products, and the path ahead for India

When it comes to product liability, the starting point of the discussion should be the 1932 "snail in the ginger beer bottle" case (Donoghue v Stevenson). The UK's House of Lords by a wafer-thin majority, laid the foundation of the law, which has since developed as an independent tort of negligence. As noted by Lord Denning in his Discipline of Law, the law laid in Donoghue (with its various extensions) has come to dominate the whole field of civil liability.

The House of Lords here held that a manufacturer must take care to avoid acts or omissions which can reasonably be foreseen as likely to cause injury. In a classic exposition of the law, Lord Atkin married law and morality: "The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law: you must not injure your neighbour." A "neighbour" can be any person closely or directly likely to be affected: "You must