The aim of the article is to analyze the reasoning of the Supreme Court of California in Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories.
Materials and methods: Materials of the study encompass US case law as well as case law of other countries concerning compensation of damage caused by defective drugs
and other cases of uncertain causation. The survey is conducted within the framework of comparative law studies. In addition, elements of law and economics approach are
also employed in the paper.
Conclusions: Case of Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories has launched a new direction in discourse on causation in tort law and product liability. The mathematical elegance of the Court's theory is that net burden of liability borne by a particular drug manufacturer is equal to the amount of damage actually caused by its drug.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.