## Facts

- Sam Pavlides and four friends took Pavlides’s Robalo 236 recreational motorboat into the Gulf of Mexico to fish near offshore oil rigs.
- After stopping at a second rig, the crew noticed water accumulating in the stern and rising through the bilge.
- The bilge pump and radio did not function because flooding reached the batteries located in the rear of the boat.
- Following sales advice for bilge flooding, the crew attempted to run the engines to self-bail; they inadvertently drifted away from the rig, and the remaining engine failed when water reached its air intake.
- One passenger swam to the rig and survived; the other four men, including Pavlides, drowned after the boat swamped.
- Evidence linked the flooding to a bilge drain plug that slipped out, allowing water to enter a “void bilge” area.
- The manufacturer marketed the boat to the general public, but the owner’s manual and sales materials did not disclose the void bilge/bilge drain arrangement or warn of the hazards of bilge flooding from loss of the drain plug.
- The model was not self-bailing and lacked a flood-warning device and an automatic bilge pump.

## Issues

1. Whether the trial court applied an incorrect legal standard by limiting the manufacturer’s duty to warn to “experts,” rather than assessing foreseeable risks and non-obvious dangers to ordinary consumers in a strict products liability failure-to-warn claim.

## Decision

- The Fifth Circuit held the district court used an erroneous and unduly restrictive “expert-only” measure of the duty to warn.
- The court vacated the judgment in favor of the manufacturer on the strict liability claim and remanded for reconsideration under the correct duty-to-warn standard and for any further necessary rulings.

## Legal Principles

- In strict products liability, a manufacturer’s duty to warn is measured by foreseeable risks to ordinary users when the product is marketed to the general public.
- A duty to warn is not confined to what highly skilled or specialized users (“experts”) might already know.
- Whether a danger is open and obvious is evaluated from the standpoint of the ordinary user.
- Failure to provide adequate warnings or instructions about serious, non-obvious dangers can render a product unreasonably dangerous as marketed.

## Conclusion

Because the trial court evaluated the adequacy of warnings through an improperly narrow “experts only” standard, the Fifth Circuit vacated the defense judgment and remanded for reassessment of the manufacturer’s warning obligations and related strict liability issues based on ordinary-user foreseeability.


Pavlides v. Galveston Yacht Basin, Inc., 727 F.2d 330 (5th Cir. 1984)