Question: MATHEWS v. UNIVERSITY LOFT CO., 903 A.2D 1120 (N.J. SUPER. CT. 2006)
FACTS Plaintiff, a 21-year-old college senior at Stockton State College, lived in a campus apartment. He slept in a new "loft bed," which was six feet off the floor. About a month after he began sleeping on the loft bed, Plaintiff was startled awake, fell off the bed, and injured his shoulder. Plaintiff continued sleeping in the loft bed, but made a point of sleeping "all the way against the wall," as far as possible from the open edge of the bed. There were no warning labels on the bed, and Plaintiff testified that it had never "cross[ed his] mind" or "occurred to" him that he could fall or that the bed was dangerous in any way. He stated that if he had seen a warning, he would have been "aware of the hazard that was present" and would have slept closer to the wall in the first place. Plaintiff was awarded $179,001 at trial on a claim "based on lack of warning." Defendant University Loft Co., the manufacturer of the bed, appealed. DECISION The appellate court ruled that Plaintiff's failure-to-warn claim should have been dismissed, and reversed the judgment for Plaintiff. Under the New Jersey Products Liability Act, a plaintiff can prove a product was defective by showing it was:
(1) defectively manufactured;
(2) defectively designed; or
(3) "failed to contain adequate warnings or instructions."
A manufacturer can avoid product liability caused by failure to warn by showing that the product has an adequate warning or instruction. As the court noted, however, adequacy of a warning becomes an issue only where there is duty to warn in the first place. Here, Defendant had no duty to warn against the danger of falling from the loft bed because the danger was "open and obvious." Under the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability § 2, a product is defective because of inadequate instructions or warnings when the foreseeable risks of harm posed by the product could have been reduced or avoided by the provision of reasonable instructions or warnings by the seller or other distributor, or a predecessor in the commercial chain of distribution, and the omission of the instructions or warnings renders the product not reasonably safe. The court went on to quote Comment j of the Restatement: In general, a product seller is not subject to liability for failing to warn or instruct regarding risks and risk-avoidance measures that should be obvious to, or generally known by, foreseeable product users.
When a risk is obvious or generally known, the prospective addressee of a warning will or should already know of its existence. Warning of an obvious or generally known risk in most instances will not provide an effective additional measure of safety. Furthermore, warnings that deal with obvious or generally known risks may be ignored by users and consumers and may diminish the significance of warnings about non-obvious, not-generally-known risks. Thus, requiring warnings of obvious or generally known risks could reduce the efficacy of warnings generally ... (emphasis added). Thus, the appellate court held that: the obviousness of the danger is an absolute defense to plaintiff's failure to warn action in this case. [W]arnings would lose their efficacy and meaning if they were placed on every instrument known to be dangerous, such as a knife, scissor, glass, bat, ball, bicycle, or other product that poses a generally-known risk of injury if misused, dropped, or fallen from.... The risks are so obvious here that we fail to see what a college student would or could have done differently while asleep to protect himself from falling, or what a warning could have advised in addition to the obvious.