Georgia law imposes strict liability on manufacturers of products that cause injury because of their condition when sold. OCGA § 51-1-11(b)(1). Georgia law also puts an outer limit on when an action for strict products liability may be brought: no such action may be commenced “with respect to an injury after ten years from the date of the first sale for use or consumption of the personal property causing or otherwise bringing about the injury.” § 51-1-11(b)(2). Applying this statute of repose is straightforward enough when a person claims that a single product caused their injury: the action is barred if the product in question was sold as new to its intended end user on a date more than ten years before the action was filed.
In a case decided by the Supreme Court of Georgia on October 15, 2025, the plaintiff alleged that she bought and used a particular product — chemical hair relaxer — many times over many years, which caused her to develop uterine fibroids. In those circumstances, the manufacturers of the products she used contended that the statute of repose does not apply to each “unit” of a product sold, but that the units instead must be treated as a group, and the statute of repose for that entire group starts running from the earliest sale in the series of sales of those units to the plaintiff.
OCGA § 51-1-11(b)(2) “establishes a period of ultimate repose within which such a right of action must accrue” and that “beyond the period set forth in a statute of repose, the cause of action simply does not exist.” Under that subsection, “[n]o action shall be commenced pursuant to this subsection with respect to an injury after ten years from the date of the first sale for use or consumption of the personal property causing or otherwise bringing about the injury.” Put another way, this provision explains when the statute of repose — the time period in which this kind of action must be brought, if it is to be brought at all — begins and ends. That repose period begins on “the date of the first sale for use or consumption” of “the personal property causing or otherwise bringing about the injury.” And it ends “ten years from” that date.
The “first sale for use or consumption” refers to the sale of the product to the “end user,” that is, the person “whose actual employment of the product was ultimately intended.” The phrase “first sale” indicates that the key sale is the sale to that intended end user “as new,” rather than any further resale of the product beyond that point (as used or otherwise).
Put simply, under OCGA § 51-1-11(b)(2), the statute of repose for a given product begins to run on the date it is sold as new to the intended end user.
The Supreme Court of Georgia stated in the case it was deciding: “But it is undisputed that Burroughs was an intended end user of the hair-relaxer products sold to her, so the question in this case is not which sale in the retail chain started the clock on the statute of repose. Instead, the question is how to apply the statute of repose when multiple units of a manufacturer’s product are sold to the same person over time, and that person alleges that more than one such unit is potentially involved in causing them injury.
The Supreme Court of Georgia held: “[T]he “first sale” language does not, as the manufacturers contend, identify the sale that starts the statute of repose from among a chain of sales at different points in time. And seeing no other language in this provision that could serve that role, we must rule out the manufacturers’ theory that “the personal property” to which the statute of repose applies can be understood as a unified group of units sold at different times. Instead, “the personal property causing or bringing about the injury” necessarily refers to any single unit alleged to have been sold as new to an intended end user. And the upshot of that conclusion is that the statute of repose is applied on a per-unit basis. In other words, OCGA § 51-1-11(b)(2) creates a ten-year statute of repose that begins to run on each sale of a unit as new to an intended end user.”
“What does this mean for applying the statute of repose in a case like this one, where a plaintiff alleges that she was injured by multiple units of a product sold to her at multiple points in time? First and foremost, it means that the statute of repose does not bar a claim for strict product liability merely because a plaintiff alleges that one or more of the units in question were sold to an intended end user more than ten years before she brought the action. To be sure, with respect to any such units, a cause of action against the manufacturer “simply does not exist.” Campbell, 288 Ga. at 536. But because the statute of repose applies to each unit, a cause of action still may exist for units sold to an intended end user less than ten years before the action was brought.”
Nonetheless, “plaintiff still has the ultimate burden to prove her claim with respect to the units sold as new to an intended end user within ten years of the date the action was brought — including that the condition of those units for which the statute has not run was “the proximate cause of the injury sustained.” OCGA § 51-1-11(b)(1).
Source Burroughs v. L’Oreal USA, Inc., S24G1388.
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