Hunter McMullin of Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin. Courtesy photo
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in its thorough, 2014 decision in Tincher v. OmegaFlex, sought to clarify products liability law in Pennsylvania, but instead, has left attorneys on both sides of the bar in the dark, specifically on the admissibility of government and industry standards. Recently granting allocator, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court heard oral argument on March 8 on Sullivan v. Werner, 253 A.2d 730 (Pa. Super. 2021), a case that may provide clarity to Pennsylvania’s murky post-Tincher landscape on these key evidentiary issues.
Pennsylvania attorneys, no matter their practice area, have undoubtedly read or heard about Tincher. The countless articles attempting to analyze, resolve, and anticipate the directionality of the law in the post-Tincher landscape are evidence of the myriad issues it wrought on the products liability bar. Tincher expressly overturned the longstanding ruling in Azzarello v. Black Brothers, 391 A.2d 1020 (Pa. 1978). The Azzarello court was concerned that a jury could not make a determination as to whether a product was “unreasonably dangerous” and left all questions regarding the risk and utility of the product to the court, as a matter of law. Azzarello provided a bright line distinction and separation of negligence principles from strict liability principles.
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