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.
Hilham is an unincorporated community in Overton County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. The community is centered around the junction of Tennessee State Route 136 (which runs north-to-south) and Tennessee State Route 85 (which runs east-to-west). Although not a census-designated place, Hilham is part of a Zip Code Tabulation Area (38568) that covers most of rural northwest Overton County. As of the 2000 census, the population of this entire area was less than 2000. Hilham was established in 1797 by an idealistic Dartmouth graduate named Moses Fisk (1759-1840), who believed the site was the geographic center of the United States (at the time, the Mississippi River was still the nation's western boundary). Fisk laid out Hilham so that roads radiated out from the center of the community to the north, south, east and west, believing that Hilham would eventually be the ultimate crossroads of the new nation. In 1806, Fisk established one of the first female academies in the southeast at Hilham. The 11,000-acre (45 km) Standing Stone State Park and Forest is located just 5 miles (8.0 km) north of Hilham along TN-136.