Recently in Products Liability and Recalls Category

Pennsylvania's Lemon Law is designed to protect consumers from unsafe and defective new cars.

You've heard the horror stories before. Someone spends tens of thousands of dollars to buy a new car. But the car spends more time getting repaired than it does on the road. Additionally, the consumer ends up spending roughly the purchase price of the car to get it back in working order.

Fortunately, for consumers in Pennsylvania, the Automobile Lemon Law may protect your rights.

Peanut butter recall lawsuits are starting!

The Pennsylvania Department of Health has issued an alert, warning citizens to steer clear of Trader Joe's Valencia Creamy Salted Peanut Butter made with sea salt.

Mouth watering?

It shouldn't. The peanut butter might be tainted with salmonella. We brought you this story several weeks ago, but now the lawsuits are starting.

The Center for Disease Control is warning people in several states, including Pennsylvania, to be on the lookout for meningitis symptoms.

The meningitis outbreak has been linked to The New England Compounding Center (NECC) in Framingham, Mass., reports The Boston Globe.

This after a Boston-area pharmacy was under fire for its link to a recent meningitis outbreak.

Earlier this year, Honda recalled several cars from its luxury Acura line. Now, the automaker has announced a similar recall for some of its Accord models. According to The Associated Press, Honda is recalling 600,000 Accords.

The issue that's triggering the recall appears to be the same: The power steering fluid could leak and cause a fire. While there have been no reports of injury yet, the potential is nevertheless scary for Honda, as even one accident could lead to serious legal consequences for the company.

Whoever said to take the lemons in life and make lemonade obviously didn't have a lemon of a car, because there's nothing you can do with that type of lemon but dump money and time into it. Luckily, Pennsylvania has lemon laws to protect consumers.

The most well-known type of lemon law protects against cars that break down after being purchased brand new. Now the protections are expanding into other fields. Pennsylvania also has a "puppy lemon law," which is meant to stop breeders and pet shops from selling sick animals.

So how do you make these laws work for you?

So you probably heard about the Trader Joe's peanut butter recall over the weekend. However, Salmonella doesn't like to limit itself to just one store or just one product.

Now the company that provides Trader Joe's Creamy Salted Valencia Peanut Butter, Sunland Inc., is recalling 76 other types of peanut butter and nut butters, according to the Associated Press. The other butters were recalled because they were processed by the same equipment as the tainted Trader Joe's brand. Currently, Sunland's plant in New Mexico is being inspected by the FDA.

Which company could potentially be liable for causing customers to get sick?

After the Jerry Sandusky debacle, everyone was hoping that Penn State would catch a break from bad press. Instead, the school was hit with this latest scoop: Customers at Penn State's Berkey Creamery allegedly found bits of plastic and even a penny in their ice cream, according to the Centre Daily Times.

The university is erring on the side of caution and pulling all the ice cream that was produced between May 16 and Aug. 11, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The recall was prompted after a criminal investigation into reports of plastic allegedly found in ice cream sold at the Creamery. The school's own investigation found that the foreign objects somehow entered the ice cream after the ice cream was produced in its facility.

So far, there are no reports of injury. But if someone had been hurt, would the Creamery be liable?

After what seemed to be an unprecedented winning streak at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, where 14 players won a total of more than $1.5 million, the casino is looking to get its money back, according to the Philadelphia Daily News. On its face, this looks like a case of the casino being a sore loser, but look closer and it is more like an enormous product liability case.

So far, it's been reported that Gemaco, a Missouri-based playing-card manufacturer, failed to shuffle its playing cards before shipping them to the Nugget, according to the Daily News. Once the cards arrived at the Nugget, no one there shuffled the cards either, so when they hit the mini-baccarat game table the players were able to notice a pattern. That pattern played out for more than two and a half hours.

A judge last week ordered the Golden Nugget to allow the winners to cash in their chips, and the Nugget's owner said he wouldn't appeal. But the casino may still have an ace up its sleeve in a defective-product lawsuit against Gemaco.

Some folks have been a little bit paranoid about the smart meters that utility companies are using these days. Smart meters are those digital electric meters that wirelessly transmit data about your energy use. Some believe that radiation from the devices can hurt them or their children, or that the new meters would transmit private information.

While most of the rabble-rousing is just that, there actually has been a danger here. The smart meters used by Peco Energy Co. have been blamed for starting fires at two of its customers' homes, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Peco says that 15 of the 186,000 digital meters installed have overheated. Some have even burst into flames.

What rights to consumers have in dealing with any damage?

It's getting pretty exciting out there for car enthusiasts who are also somewhat eco-conscious, with the advent of the all-electric Tesla Roadster a few years ago and the more recent release of the Fisker Karma -- an all-electric vehicle with a gas generator engine, much like the Chevrolet Volt.

Like many new cars and car manufacturers, the Karma is facing some difficulties with its first production runs. This current Fisker Karma recall is the third since the release of the vehicle, according to Forbes. The ironic issue with the $107,000 car is that the cooling fan overheats and can set it on fire, as it did to one car in Woodside, Calif.

So if there haven't been any accidents, why is Fisker recalling the vehicles?