It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break
a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the
house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a
successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking
has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable
for their customers’ misfortunes. Feeling threatened, companies
responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every
possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that
warn, among other things, that you might — surprise! — fall off. The label on a
child’s batman cape cautions that toy "does not enable user to fly".
While warnings are often appropriate and necessary — the dangers of drug
interactions, for instance — and many are required by state or federal
regulations, it isn’t clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and
sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the
companies lose when injured customers take them to court. Now
the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before,
some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a
warning label probably wouldn’t have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons,
president of Schutt Sportswear in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit
involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt
helmet. "We’re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren’t designed
to prevent those kinds of injuries," says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the
nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete’s injury. At
the same time, the American Law Institute — a group of judges, lawyers, and
academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight — issued new guidelines
stating that companies need not warn customers of various dangers or bombard
(轰炸) them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get
buries in a sea of trivialities." says a law professor at Comell Law School who
helped draft the new guidelines. "The information on products might actually be
provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal
liability."
(365 words) Manufacturers mentioned in the passage were obliged to make the best of warning labels sb as to ______ .