Product Liability Bill Backed
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LEAD: The House Energy and Commerce Committee today approved a product liability bill that consumer advocates maintain constitutes an assault on the legal rights of victims of hazardous goods. The House Energy and Commerce Committee today approved a product liability bill that consumer advocates maintain constitutes an assault on the legal rights of victims of hazardous goods. The compromise measure, which is given virtually no chance of passing Congress this year, would establish uniform Federal liability standards for lawsuits over defective consumer goods and would pre-empt conflicting but generally stronger state laws. A similar measure died on the Senate floor in 1986 after a filibuster led by Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina. Business lobbyists say a Federal law would ease the growing burden of liability insurance costs and result in lower prices. Consumer groups say the bill will make it harder for victims to recover damages from manufacturers of unsafe products. The bill, was approved 30 to 12 with the unanimous support of the committee’s 17 Republicans and a bare 13-member majority of its 25 Democrats. The measure now heads for further study by the Judiciary Committee, which shares jurisdiction and has traditionally favored trial lawyers in their opposition to such bills. ”We are getting ready for a fight in Judiciary,” said Representative Mike Synar, Democrat of Oklahoma, who had won the Energy and Commerce panel’s approval of several amendments favoring consumers. Consumer lobbyists lost no time criticizing the bill and its supporters. Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, said: ”Since 1981, American industry has been battering away at Congress, trying to get a pre-emptive Federal product liability law passed that would give manufacturers and sellers greater opportunity to place dangerous products on the market with diminished liability to the people they injure. Today a majority of the committee brought that consumer nightmare a little closer to reality.” |