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On August 29, 2023, the NAM filed an amicus brief urging the Texas Supreme Court to rigorously enforce the State’s non-liability defense under Section 82.008 of the Texas Code for manufacturers that comply with federal safety standards. In this case, Sarah Milburn, a passenger seated in the middle seat of the third row of an Uber minivan, was severely injured when a pickup truck collided with the passenger side of the minivan. Sarah and her parents sued Honda for negligence in designing, manufacturing, and marketing the minivan’s third-row middle seat belt system, maintaining that the seat belt was not adequately designed, manufactured, or marketed to minimize the risk of injury. A jury returned a verdict for the plaintiffs, which a Texas court of appeal affirmed on appeal. And the Texas Supreme Court granted Honda’s request to hear the case.

We argue in our amicus brief that Honda’s seat belt system complied with federal safety standards. For a plaintiff to overcome a non-liability defense asserted under Section 82.008, the plaintiff must establish federal regulations are inadequate to protect from an unreasonable risk of injury or damage because there has been such a material change in technology or society that no reasonable manufacturer at the time of manufacture could believe that the standard remains adequate to protect the public. The plaintiffs failed to meet their burden. Further, the plaintiff’s proposed alternative design for the seat belt system was insufficient to support a product liability claim because it would have destroyed the utility of the third-row seats in the minivan and a manufacturer need not destroy a product’s utility to make it safer. Ensuring rigorous enforcement of Texas’ non-liability defense is important to prevent a broad tort—product liability—from becoming entirely boundless from a plaintiff expert’s benefit of hindsight to second guess a product’s design and manufacture.