Venezia v. Miller Brewing Co.

• Decision Date: 18 July 1980
• Docket Number: No. 80-1036,80-1036
• Citation: 626 F.2d 188
• Parties: 29 UCC Rep.Serv. 487 Patricia VENEZIA, Individually, and as she is next friend of Louis Venezia, a minor, Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. MILLER BREWING COMPANY et al., Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 188

626 F.2d 188

29 UCC Rep.Serv. 487

Patricia VENEZIA, Individually, and as she is next friend of

Louis Venezia, a minor, Plaintiffs, Appellants, v. MILLER BREWING COMPANY et al., Defendants, Appellees.

No. 80-1036.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Argued May 8, 1980.

Decided July 18, 1980.

William J. Rooney, Jr., Brighton, Mass., with whom Arthur J. McCabe, II, and McCabe & Sidel, Boston, Mass., were on brief, for plaintiffs, appellants.

Thomas E. Peisch, Boston, Mass., with whom Thomas D. Burns and Burns & Levinson, Boston, Mass., were on brief, for Thatcher Glass Manufacturing Corporation, defendant, appellee.

Ronald E. Harding, Boston, Mass., with whom Ralph H. Willard, Jr. and Weston, Patrick, Willard & Redding, Boston, Mass., were on brief, for Foster-Forbes Glass Company, defendant, appellee.

Louis N. Massery, with whom Law Offices of James D. Casey, Boston, Mass., was on brief, for Miller Brewing Co., and Brockway Glass Company, defendants, appellees.

Before COFFIN, Chief Judge, CAMPBELL, Circuit Judge, and DAVIS, ^* Judge, U.S. Court of Claims.

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Circuit Judge.

Plaintiff appeals the district court's dismissal, for failure to state a claim, of the complaint filed in this diversity action. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b) (6). The complaint charged Miller Brewing Company and three manufacturers of glass products with negligence, gross negligence and breach of warranty in connection with the design and manufacture of a glass bottle used as a container for Miller Beer. ¹ The complaint alleged that plaintiff, then eight years of age, was playing with friends near his home when he "found a non-returnable Miller High Life clear glass bottle" which had been "discarded by . . . persons unknown. . . ." During the course of play the "thin walled" bottle, in plaintiff's words, "came in contact with a telephone pole." Plaintiff, in his brief, has clarified this phrase, indicating that he was the party responsible for throwing the bottle against the pole. Following the impact of the glass container with the telephone pole the bottle shattered, and particles of glass entered plaintiff's eye causing severe injury. Plaintiff's basic premise is that Miller and the bottle manufacturers should have been aware of the dangers inherent in their "thin walled" "non-returnable" bottles and should have accordingly designed and marketed a product better able to safely withstand such foreseeable misuse as breakage in the course of improper handling by children.

The district court indicated that it accepted as true all the well-pleaded allegations, see O'Brien v. DiGrazia, 544 F.2d 543, 545 (1st Cir. 1976), cert. denied, 431 U.S. 914, 97 S.Ct. 2173, 53 L.Ed.2d 223 (1977), but nonetheless found the complaint deficient. The court concluded that "the defendant could (not) be negligent in any respect, nor, realistically, liable under any theory of warranty on the facts alleged. . . ." We affirm.

Plaintiff's allegation of breach of warranty is based upon Mass. G.L. c. 106 § 2-314, which provides that a merchant impliedly warrants that his goods are, inter alia, "fit for the ordinary purposes for which such goods are used." (Emphasis added.) The linchpin of the warranty claim (and, as will be seen, the negligence claim also) is thus the proper scope of the term ordinary purpose. While at first blush it might appear beyond dispute that throwing a glass container into a telephone pole is by no means an "ordinary" use of that product, some brief examination of recent authority relied on by plaintiff in support of the contrary view may be helpful in explaining just why the initial impression is, in fact, sound.

In Back v. Wickes Corp., --- Mass. ---, 378 N.E.2d 964 (1978), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court explored the contours of section 2-314's "ordinary purpose" concept and concluded that the " 'ordinary purposes' contemplated by (that warranty) section include both those uses which the manufacturer intended and those which are reasonably foreseeable." 378 N.E.2d at 969. "It is no more than a play on words," the court concluded, "to charge that goods must be fit for 'ordinary' purposes, but not for 'extraordinary' or 'different' or 'unusual' purposes. Such (language) fails to inform . . . as to whether the defendant has warranted the goods to be free from the propensity that caused the plaintiff's injuries." 378 N.E.2d at 968.

Seizing on these passages and the Supreme Judicial Court's further admonition that a manufacturer must, in designing a product, "anticipate the environment in which (that) product will be used," plaintiff urges that the present defendants might reasonably be found by a jury to have broken a fitness warranty by designing and manufacturing glass bottles unable to safely withstand the arguably foreseeable product abuse that occurred here.

The weakness with plaintiff's contention, however, is that it divorces the language of the Back decision from that case's underlying facts. Back involved the question of the liability of a manufacturer of motor homes for wrongful death and personal injuries resulting when one of its vehicles exploded and burst into flames following a collision with a cable fence at the side of the highway. Plaintiffs there maintained that the manufacturer's positioning of the motor home's gasoline tank was responsible for making an otherwise minor collision fatal. The court's inquiry in Back, similar to that engaged in by other courts in the so-called second collision cases, see, e. g., Turcotte v. Ford Motor Co., 494 F.2d 173 (1st Cir. 1974); Larsen v. General Motors Corp., 391 F.2d 495 (8th Cir. 1968); Smith v. Ariens Co., 375 Mass. 620, 377 N.E.2d 954 (1978), focused on the question whether the defendant's conscious design choices could be viewed as having rendered the motor home unreasonably dangerous to its users and therefore unfit for highway travel its intended use. 378 N.E.2d at 970. In answering that question affirmatively and remanding the case for a new trial, we believe the Back court held only that a manufacturer's warranty of product fitness for ordinary use includes a guarantee that such product will withstand, in a reasonably safe manner, foreseeable "misuse" incident to or arising out of the product's intended use. See W. Prosser, The Law of Torts, § 96, p. 646 (1971). We think it would be stretching too far to believe that the Massachusetts courts are presently prepared to expand their definition of "ordinary purposes" to include the deliberate misuse of an otherwise reasonably safe container in a manner totally unrelated to any normal or intended use of that item. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court previously has found no breach of a warranty of merchantability where a plaintiff was injured by glass breakage sustained in an attempt to pry the cover off a glass baby food jar with a beer-type can opener. ² Vincent v. Nicholas E. Tsiknas Co., 337 Mass. 726, 151 N.E.2d 263 (1958). A fortiori, we can see no possible implied fitness warranty that an empty glass bottle discarded by unknown persons would more safely withstand being intentionally smashed against a solid stationary object. Under Massachusetts law the question of fitness for ordinary purposes is largely one centering around reasonable consumer expectations. Back, supra, 378 N.E.2d at 970; Vincent, supra, 151 N.E.2d at 265. "The propensity of glass to break under pressure is common knowledge," Vincent, 151 N.E.2d at 265. No reasonable consumer would expect anything but that a glass beer bottle, apparently well suited for its immediate intended use, would fail to safely withstand the type of purposeful abuse involved here. In fact, one would suspect that the present eight year old plaintiff knew well the expected result, if not the potential injury, of his conduct. What, if not the possibility of shattering the bottle, would lead him to throw it against the pole in the first place? Cf. Geary v. H. P. Hood & Sons, Inc., 336 Mass. 369, 145 N.E.2d 716, 717 (1957) ("It must be assumed . . . that children at play sometimes throw available objects for various reasons. But almost every object placed in schoolhouses and play yards for school purposes may conceivably inflict serious and regrettable injury when thrown.")

The same considerations which lead us to conclude that the district court properly dismissed the plaintiff's warranty claim indicate that the claims grounded in negligence are likewise fatally deficient. "By and large, the standard of safety of goods is the same under the warranty theory as under the negligence theory. In both actions the plaintiff must show . . . that the goods were unreasonably dangerous . . . for the purpose to which they would ordinarily be put. . . ." 2 Harper and James, The Law of Torts, § 28.22, p. 1584 (1956); quoted in Schneider v. Chrysler Motors Corp., 401 F.2d 549 (8th Cir. 1968); see Smith v. Ariens Co., 375 Mass. 620, 377 N.E.2d 954, 957 (1978) ("Under our cases . . . a manufacturer has (a) duty to design products so that they are reasonably fit for the purposes for which they are intended.") ³

Plaintiff again, as he did in his warranty argument, attempts to expand the scope of the "intended" use concept by resort to the familiar, and sometimes misleading, rubric of "foreseeability." But reliance on such generality is of limited assistance, for "In a sense, in retrospect almost nothing is unforeseeable." Green v. Volkswagen of America, Inc, 485 F.2d 430, 438 (6th Cir. 1973) (quoting Mieher v. Brown, 54 Ill.2d 539, 301 N.E.2d 307 (Ill.1973), see also Prosser, supra, § 43, p. 267-68. One with the time and imagination and aided by hindsight no doubt can conjure up all sorts of arguably "foreseeable" misuses of a variety of otherwise reasonable safe products. We see no evidence that the Massachusetts courts have abandoned their previously expressed view that "a common or straightforward product, if safe for normal uses reasonably to...