DE · jury_instructions
Del. P.J.I. Civ. § 9.8
Strict Liability – Leased Property / Bailments
STRICT LIABILITY – LEASED PROPERTY
One who leases a product that is in defective condition and is unreasonably
dangerous to the user of the product, or to the user’s property, is strictly liable,
without proof of negligence, if:
(1) the lessor is engaged in the business of leasing such products; and
(2) the product is expected to, and does, reach the user without substantial
change in its condition when leased.
A substantial change occurs when the leased product is changed by someone
other than the lessor in a way that the lessor could not have reasonably foreseen,
given the product’s intended use.
This liability applies even if the lessor exercised all possible care in preparing
and leasing the product.
Provenance
- Source
- courts.delaware.gov
- Retrieved
- 2026-09-23
- Edition
- civ-2025-10-22
- Content hash
0c9628816081c007f3ba1e32e84ed2c60ced395856ac6339e491dee2193efa81
The link goes to the issuing authority’s own document — the one we read to produce this record. Where a source publishes whole titles rather than sections, your browser may need a moment to jump to the provision.
Unofficial copy of government-published law, reproduced from official sources with full provenance. Not an official publication; verify against official sources before relying on it in a filing. Records in the 'guidance' corpus, and only that corpus, are sub-regulatory (interpretive guidelines, survey procedures) and are not binding law. Validity bounds follow each jurisdiction's declared temporalBasis.