Larry Coben’s recent article in the Law Weekly, published on Aug. 15, asks the question, “Should Vehicle Manufacturers Be Entitled to Apportionment of Liability?” We contend that Pennsylvania’s tort law should be applied to vehicle manufacturers in just the same way it is applied to any other litigant.
Allocating liability between a negligent driver and an automobile maker liable for a crashworthiness defect requires the use of straightforward, universally applicable, principles of tort law. The common law provides that each tortfeasor is responsible for all injuries proximately caused by a tort, and therefore it frequently occurs that more than one defendant is liable for a particular injury. “It is axiomatic that, in a common law tort action, the tortfeasor is liable for all injury caused by his negligence or other unlawful conduct,” as in Better v. Forbes, 519 Pa. 422, 426, 548 A.2d 1215, 1217 (1988), and Wallace v. Pennsylvania Railroad, 222 Pa. 556, 564, 71 A. 1086, 1089 (1909) (negligent medical treatment of accident-induced injury did not relieve the original tortfeasor of liability because “the consequences following the operation and resulting directly therefrom are in a legal sense the sequence and result of the original accident”). Common law jurisdictions have rules for which tortfeasor pays how much under these circumstances. In Pennsylvania the Comparative Negligence Act and the Uniform Contribution Among Tort-feasors Act control the question, as in Kemper National P&C Companies v. Smith, 419 Pa. Super. 295, 309, 615 A.2d 372, 379 (1992) (“the rights of contribution and apportionment of liability among multiple defendants is a matter which is governed exclusively by statute in Pennsylvania”).
