Federal court says Amazon can be sued over defective product

A federal appeals court has ruled that Amazon can be sued over a defective product sold by one of its third-party vendors, in a decision the dissenting judge called “a relatively uncharted area of law.”

The lawsuit was brought by a Pennsylvania woman who suffered permanent blindness in one eye after a retractable dog leash she bought online snapped and hit her four years ago.

Heather Oberdorf sued Amazon for strict products liability and negligence, but a lower court ruled that the online retailer was protected because it couldn’t be characterized as a seller under state law. It also concluded that her claims were barred by the Communications Decency Act, a 1990s federal law that shields online publishers of third-party content.

In a 2-1 decision released last week, however, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia reversed most of the lower court’s ruling, holding that Amazon can be classified as a seller in part because it doesn’t allow customers to communicate directly with third-party vendors.

David Wilk, an attorney who argued the case for Oberdorf, said he believed it was the first time a court had characterized Amazon as a seller under state products liability laws.

“There’s an intuitive logic to our position, and it wasn’t a hard argument to make,” he said. “It was just a matter of whether the court was going to look past what I considered an antiquated precedent.”

An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment Tuesday on the 3rd Circuit’s ruling.

Amazon had cited a 1980s Pennsylvania case involving a man injured by a tractor his father had bought at an auction. A court had found that the auction house couldn’t be held liable because it wasn’t a seller but had only acted as an agent for the seller. The appeals court disagreed with that interpretation, writing that, while items sold by Amazon can be traced to a vendor, customers can only communicate with vendors through the retailer’s site.

“This enables third-party vendors to conceal themselves from the customer, leaving customers injured by defective products with no direct recourse to the third-party vendor,” the majority wrote. “There are numerous cases in which neither Amazon nor the party injured by a defective product, sold by Amazon.com, were able to locate the product’s third-party vendor or manufacturer.”

That is what occurred in Oberdorf’s case, according to the ruling.