Barron v. Ford Motor Co‪.‬

POSNER, Circuit Judge. Tina Barron, age 18, was rendered paraplegic and forced onto the welfare rolls as the result of an accident in 1984 in which the car she was riding in (driven by her sister) skidded on a rain-slick highway in North Carolina and turned over. Because Barron was not wearing a seatbelt (although the car was equipped with seatbelts), she was flung out of the car, either through the closed sunroof, as she claims, or through the window on the passengers side of the front seat, which was also closed. Although a citizen of Illinois, Barron brought suit against Ford Motor Company of Canada, the manufacturer of the car, in a Florida state court. The parties being of diverse citizenship and Ford not a citizen of Florida, Ford was able to remove the case to federal district court in Florida, from which it sought to transfer the case, on grounds of convenience, 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), to the Eastern District of North Carolina. The plaintiff countered with a request to transfer the case to the Central District of Illinois, and her request was granted and the case transferred. Applying Floridas rules on conflict of laws (and thus anticipating Ferens v. John Deere Co., 494 U.S. 516, 108 L. Ed. 2d 443, 110 S. Ct. 1274 (1990), which holds that the transferee court must apply the conflict of laws rules of the transferor jurisdiction whether the defendant or the plaintiff requested the transfer), Judge Mihm ruled that the law of North Carolina--as it happens, the only state in the United States not to recognize strict liability in products cases, Smith v. Fiber Controls Corp., 300 N.C. 669, 678, 268 S.E.2d 504, 509-10 (1980); Warren v. Colombo, 93 N.C. App. 92, 102, 377 S.E.2d 249, 255 (1989) governed the substantive issues in the case. A two-week jury trial, in which the plaintiff tried to prove that she had been ejected through the sunroof and that Ford had been negligent in making the sunroof out of tempered rather than laminated glass, ended in a verdict for Ford.