Dozens of lawsuits have been filed after a Farmingdale High School bus crash that killed two adults and injured dozens of students on Sept. 21, 2023. Fordham Law Interim Associate Dean for Research Benjamin C. Zipursky discusses the merits of the case in this Newsday article.
What do the suits allege?
Most of the lawsuits allege negligence, a basic concept of civil law. Negligence is the “failure to behave with the level of care that a reasonable person would have exercised under the same circumstances,” according to Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute.
There are several distinct elements to legal negligence, including a defendant’s duty of care, but to build any case on negligence claim, “you have to show harm and you have to show a causal connection between the negligence and the harm,” said Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham Law School in Manhattan.
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What’s Bridgestone’s role?
Some of the suits make product liability claims against the tiremaker, arguing that the company bears blame because its tire caused or contributed to the crash. Product liability claims relate to defects in manufacturing, design and warning or information about the product, said Touro Law Center’s Weil.
While some suits allege the company was negligent, if a plaintiff can “prove there was a problem in a tire of Bridgestone’s, and that’s what caused [the crash],” that would be enough to establish liability, Zipursky said. In that case, he added, “we don’t really care much, in the legal system, whether you can actually prove the company was negligent in failing to catch this defect.”
Read “Farmingdale High School bus crash: The latest on the lawsuits” on Newsday.