A duty to warn is a concept that arises in the law of torts in a number of circumstances, indicating that a party will be held liable for injuries caused to another, where the party had the opportunity to warn the other of a hazard and failed to do so. Law (a loanword from Old Norse lag), in politics and jurisprudence, is a set of rules or norms of conduct which mandate, proscribe or permit specified relationships among people and organizations, provide methods for ensuring the impartial treatment of such people, and provide punishments for those who do not follow... In the common law, a tort is a civil wrong for which the law provides a remedy. ... A party is a person or group of persons that compose a single entity which can be identified as one for the purposes of the law. ...
Most notably, a property owner has a duty to warn persons on the property of various hazards, depending on the status of the person on the property. For example, the property owner must warn an anticipated or discovered trespasser of deadly conditions known to the property owner, but that would be hidden from the trespasser. The property owner must warn licensees of all known hazards (whether deadly or not), and must warn invitees of all dangers that the property owner can discover through a reasonable inspection of the property. Trespasser (released in 1998) was a game taking place in the world of Jurassic Park. ...
The duty to warn also arises in products liability cases, where manufacturers are held stricly liable for injuries caused by hazards inherent in the use of their products. Manufacturing is the transformation of raw materials into finished goods for sale, or intermediate processes involving the production or finishing of semi-manufactures. ...
First, the manufacturer has a duty to inform the physician about the uses and hazards of its drug; second, the physician has a duty to relate to each of her patients the dangers of using that prescription drug.
Here again, however, the pharmacist's duty to warn rests on a narrow factual scenario in which the physician's prescription was clearly erroneous in light of a toxicity well known among pharmacists.
One study approximates the costs of a duty to warn regime to be between $70 and $140 million per year.
In an action alleging breach of a duty to warn, the court must determine whether the manufacturer had a duty to warn of the risk that materialized and whether that duty was breached in the circumstances of the case.
Warnings necessary to advise consumers of a manufacture or design defect require a higher standard of care than those required due to a risk that is inherent in the normal use of the product.
The duty to warn is a continuing duty that requires the manufacturer to warn the consumer of inherent risks and dangers that are discovered even after the product has been released to the market.
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