Products liability doctrine holds a manufacturer, or other party involved in selling a product, strictly liable when an article, placed into the market with knowledge that it is to be used without inspection for defects, proves to have a defect that causes a personal injury. Consumers who are injured because of a fault with a product that the consumers had no ability to protect themselves against may recover against the manufacturer under a theory of products liability.
Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA. It is named after a tree called El Palo Alto. The city includes portions of Stanford University and is headquarters to a number of Silicon Valley high-technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard, VMware and Facebook. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 58,598 residents.