Products Liability sits at an odd intersection: it is one of the oldest, most settled bodies of American law, and one of the fastest-changing. The doctrine formed around industrial-era products (cars, machinery, pharmaceuticals) and has spent the better part of a century absorbing new technologies without abandoning its core logic. That tension, between doctrine built for yesterday’s products and facts generated by today’s, is where this course lives. We will not try to resolve every question digital products raise for liability law. We will learn to reason through them the way courts, regulators, and business leaders actually have to: case by case, under uncertainty, with real consequences attached to the answer.

This course does not reward memorization the way a survey course might. You will read cases, but the goal is not to recite holdings back on an exam: it is to argue with them, to identify where a rule that made sense for a 1970s lawnmower breaks down when applied to an algorithm that updates itself after sale. You will be pushed to think like a manager as often as like a lawyer: not just what does the law say, but who bears the cost of this decision, and how would a reasonable company respond to that exposure. If you have succeeded in other courses by outlining chapters and memorizing black-letter rules, that skill will still matter here, but it will not be enough on its own.

We will work primarily through case-based analysis: briefing cases, identifying the doctrine at issue, and applying it to genuinely unsettled questions. Is a social media platform’s design a defect? Is an AI hiring tool a product? Who counts as the manufacturer of a system that keeps learning after it ships? I will use the Socratic method both in class and in our discussions outside it, and I expect you to arrive prepared to be asked, not just to listen. We will also use a mix of digital platforms and collaborative tools to do this work, culminating in a team project you will build and publish yourselves. Some of these tools may be new to you. That is by design: a course about how liability law adapts to new technology should ask you to adapt to a few new tools along the way.

Products liability has always been a reactive field: courts and legislatures tend to respond after an injury, a recall, or a public failure exposes a gap in existing rules. Part of what this course asks of you is less reactive than that. We will use a Flexibility, Adaptability, Imagination, and Resilience lens throughout the semester to practice anticipating where liability exposure is heading, not just cataloging where it has already been. That means holding two ideas at once: real respect for how doctrine has adapted successfully for seventy years, and honest skepticism about whether it can keep adapting fast enough for products that learn, update, and interact with each other in ways their own designers may not fully predict.

None of this works if the course stays one-directional. I expect us to build a genuinely collaborative environment, one where you come prepared to disagree with a case, with each other, and occasionally with me, and where we treat that disagreement as the actual work of the course rather than a detour from it. You are entering this material with less legal background than a law student and more direct experience as a consumer of digital products than most judges currently deciding these cases. That combination is more useful than it might feel on day one. Come ready to use it.