One of the most widely anticipated events at the recent Star Wars Celebration in Chicago was a look at the long-awaited final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
In a preview clip shown at the Clone Wars panel, we saw Ahsoka in mortal danger as her speeder bike unexpectedly malfunctioned, plunging Ahsoka down a giant shaft that led to Coruscant’s lower levels. Ahsoka survived the incident thanks to her resourcefulness and ex-Jedi agility. But assuming that Ahsoka suffered some compensable injury, could Ahsoka call upon the power of products liability to recover for her speeder mishap?
The law of products liability allows consumers who are injured by defective products, such as cars and speeder bikes, to sue manufacturers and retailers to recover compensatory damages. Products liability law is pro-consumer in the sense that it operates under a strict liability standard, which means that the plaintiff does not have to prove any bad intent on the defendant’s part. Rather, the injured consumer must prove only that the defendant’s conduct was responsible for the product’s malfunction that caused the plaintiff’s injury.
But despite this litigation leg-up, Ahsoka’s products liability case is not out of the Forest Moon of Endor just yet. In order to advise Ahsoka on her best course of action, we would need to know more about what caused the sparking console and loss of control we saw in the Clone Wars Season 7 clip.
If an idiosyncratic failure of her speeder bike caused the accident, then Ahsoka would have to pursue damages for a manufacturing defect. This approach is for products that are damaged by someone along the supply chain in a manner that results in the product’s malfunction during its normal use by the consumer. Ahsoka would face an initial burden to establish that the manufacturer or dealership somehow damaged the speeder bike’s repulsorlifts. Then, the defendant(s) could avoid liability by proving that Ahsoka’s accident resulted from her misuse of the speeder bike, but more on that in a moment.
On the other hand, what if Coruscant commuters regularly used speeder bikes to descend to Coruscant’s lower levels, but this particular make or model of speeder bike had a design flaw that made it unsafe for that foreseeable use? In that case, Ahsoka is looking at a design defect lawsuit. This type of products liability case involves vehicles that are “built in accordance with . . . intended specifications, but the [vehicle’s] design itself is inherently defective.” McCabe v. Am. Honda Motor Co., 100 Cal. App. 4th 1111, 1120 (2002). California courts have adopted two alternative methods of establishing this kind of design defect liability. See Barker v. Lull Eng’g Co., 20 Cal. 3d 413, 432 (1978) (describing the consumer expectation test and the risk-benefit test).
First, Ahsoka may try to establish strict liability for a design defect under the “consumer expectation test.” This test is appropriate if the product is something about which an ordinary consumer would have safety expectations. Given that another speeder bike rider is briefly visible in the Celebration clip, Coruscant drivers generally are comfortable riding down a seemingly bottomless shaft on a speeder. Ahsoka would have to prove that her speeder model’s repulsorlift system was not designed to be powerful enough to accommodate her gravity-defying maneuver, even though consumers in a galaxy far, far away would expect it to be.
Second, a court may analyze Ahsoka’s case under the “risk-benefit test.” This test permits the product’s designer to avoid liability where, for example, the inherently dangerous design poses only a small risk of injury and the feasibility and cost of alternative designs are prohibitive. But even under this risk-benefit balancing, the risk of free-falling down a giant shaft seems great enough that the manufacturer should be held strictly liable for any design flaws that caused Ahsoka’s accident.
As referenced previously, the manufacturer may, in any event, avoid strict liability if it established that Ahsoka’s accident was caused by her misuse of the speeder, in which case Ahsoka’s injuries would be her own fault. Specifically, the manufacturer may argue that charging over a dizzying precipice is not one of the ordinary and foreseeable uses of speeder bikes, which evidently include hauling starship salvage on Jakku or, perhaps less frequently, hunting your mother’s abductors across Tatooine.
Capable of high-speed frictionless travel and with no obvious rider safety features, speeder bikes in the Star Wars universe seem designed for just one purpose: exposing riders to enormous risks of injury and death, particularly when ridden in proximity to old-growth redwoods. But even so, Ahsoka seems like she has a strong case for strict products liability after the harrowing events shown in the Celebration clip. In addition to her two shiny new lightsabers and her own division of clone troopers, perhaps the real takeaway at Celebration was the set-up for Ahsoka’s heroic consumer rights class action legal victory over unscrupulous speeder bike manufacturers.
