Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Lucia Salazar and I'm a first year Philosophy major from Miami, Florida! I'm currently in the Honors college on a pre-law track (hoping to become a medical malpractice lawyer) and am researching about the history of pharmaceutical product liability law in the United States.

Product Liability Law in the U.S.: An Analysis of its History

Abstract

This project aims to answer the question of how the history of pharmaceutical liability law in the United States has evolved over time. This research is being conducted in the hopes that it will eventually become part of a larger work about the history of medicine in America as well as to gather information about a topic that has very little documentation the further back in time one goes. The project was accomplished by using a variety of online sources provided to the researcher through Florida State University and other publicly available sources such as the national archives. These sources were all stored, analyzed, and ordered in a comprehensive timeline to map out the history of product liability law. This provided the researcher with a timeline of not only important laws and court cases pertaining to this topic over time but also how legal arguments in these cases have evolved. The results suggest that legal practices in these cases have become more systematic and group-oriented. Class-action lawsuits as well as lawyers meeting and strategizing before court cases are much more common than before. Further studies could be done to investigate even further back in time or to predict the future of these legal practices.

Keywords: Medicine, Law, Product Liability, Pharmaceutical, History