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.
Bartlesville is a city in Osage and Washington counties in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The population was 34,748 at the 2000 census. Bartlesville is located forty-seven miles north of Tulsa and very close to Oklahoma's northern border with Kansas. It is the county seat of Washington County, in which most of the city lies. Bartlesville is notable as the longtime home of Phillips Petroleum Company, now merged with Conoco as ConocoPhillips. Frank Phillips, who has a principal street named after him (the hospital is named after his wife Jane), founded Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville in 1905 when the area was still Indian Territory. Phillips has always been the largest employer. Chiefly white-collar workers are employed by ConocoPhillips in Bartlesville, as the industrial extraction and refining work is done elsewhere in the state and throughout the world. The city has one daily newspaper and several radio stations. It is one of two places in Oklahoma where a Lenape Native American tribe lives, the other being Anadarko.