When you're a huge nerd like me, you not only read court opinions for school, but you also get really excited to read those court opinions when it's written by a judge that you like to read. There are a few judges I love to read, even if I don't agree with everything they write. Judge Posner from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is one of those. The latest opinion we read from him opens with, "Richard Welge, forty-something but young in spirit, loves to sprinkle peanuts on his ice cream sundaes." And continues later:

Even so, the defendants point out, it is always possible that the jar was damaged while it was sitting unattended on the top of the refrigerator, in which event they are not responsible. Only if it had been securely under lock and key when not being used could the plaintiff and Karen Godfrey be certain that nothing happened to damage it after she brought it home. That is true--there are no metaphysical certainties--but it leads nowhere. Elves may have played ninepins with the jar of peanuts while Welge and Godfrey were sleeping; but elves could remove a jar of peanuts from a locked cupboard. The plaintiff in a products liability suit is not required to exclude every possibility, however fantastic or remote, that the defect which led to the accident was caused by someone other than one of the defendants.

I mean, come on. Inject this into my veins.

Another fascinating thing about reading opinions while studying how one area of law has developed is seeing how judge's concurring and dissenting opinions in one case end up being the rationale for the majority in a later case. Justice William Brennan of the Supreme Court was notorious for this in personal jurisdiction cases.

Here's a great example from my readings this week.

We're learning about strict products liability law, and the big crux of this area of tort law is that manufacturers and distributers don't have to be negligent (i.e. do anything "wrong" necessarily) for someone to recover against them. They are held strictly liable.

In 1944, strict products liability wasn't really a thing, but a justice on the California Supreme Court really wanted it to be a thing. In Escola v. Coco Cola Bottling Co., Justice Rodger Traynor wrote a concurring opinion advocating for strict products liability. He wrote:

In my opinion, it should now be recognized that a manufacturer incurs an absolute liability when an article that he has placed on the market, knowing that it is to be used without inspection, proves to have a defect that causes injury to human beings.

And here Justice Traynor is again in 1963, almost twenty years later, writing the same thing in the majority opinion in Greenman v. Yuba Power Products, Inc., thereby creating strict products liability for tort actions in California:

A manufacturer is strictly liable in tort when an article he places on the market, knowing that it is to be used without inspection for defects, proves to have a defect that causes injury to a human being.

And just like that, strict products liability is birthed into existence. I love finding stuff like this and connecting the dots.