Fall 2026 Winner of the Path to Law Scholarship

Márk István Lédeczi-Domonkos

Márk, a first-generation student and the newest winner of the Path to Law Scholarship, is pursuing his legal education at Columbia School of Law. We are honored to support Márks academic pursuits and look forward to all he will accomplish during and after law school.

Read Their Essay Here:

As self-driving vehicles become increasingly common, policymakers, courts, and manufacturers face an important legal question: who should bear liability when an autonomous vehicle causes an accident?

While the technology itself may be novel, the underlying legal problem is not. Throughout history, the law has repeatedly adapted to innovations that transferred operational control from humans to increasingly automated systems, slowly transitioning from operator liability to manufacturers while preserving limited circumstances for continued shared liability. Rather than creating an entirely new framework, lawmakers and courts should look to analogous technologies that prompted similar shifts in control and responsibility. By applying established principles of negligence and product liability, the law can address autonomous vehicles without abandoning the predictability and continuity that are essential to a stable legal system.

The transition from manually operated to automatic elevators offers the most compelling historical parallel for the legal community to follow. In the early twentieth century, elevators required licensed operators to control movement and ensure passenger safety, much like how automobile operation requires licensure today. Liability for elevator accidents during this era followed straightforward negligence principles: if an operator failed to exercise reasonable care, both the operator and their employer could be held liable. This changed dramatically as automatic elevators became standard in the 1950s and 1960s. Cases like Bond v. Otis Elevator Co., 370 S.W.2d 434 (Tex. 1963), established that when no human operator is present, courts will apply res ipsa loquitur, the principle that a malfunction itself serves as evidence of negligence, shifting the burden of liability upward through the stream of commerce onto those who designed, manufactured, and maintained the system rather than the user. However, this shift has not eliminated liability entirely from non-manufacturers. Where proper maintenance was neglected by a building owner, or where a user deliberately tampered with the mechanism, courts have continued to find shared or alternative liability in those specific circumstances. The elevator's legal evolution thus produced a tiered framework: primary liability rests with the manufacturer and those responsible for the system's integrity, while residual liability remains available where human negligence or misconduct independently contributes to harm.

It is also a false premise to assume that the transition from user to manufacturer liability in the automobile context has not already begun. While most vehicles are not yet fully autonomous, the operation of a modern car is already substantially automated. When transmission defects, automatic braking failures, or lane-keeping assist malfunctions cause accidents, courts have increasingly held manufacturers liable rather than drivers, because the driver had no meaningful control over the failure. In Varela v. FCA US LLC, No. CV-20-0157-PR (Ariz. 2022), the Arizona Supreme Court held that a product liability claim against an automaker for failing to install automatic emergency braking technology was not preempted by federal law, confirming that manufacturers can be held accountable under state tort law when automated systems are absent or defective.

All this goes to show that the legal path forward for autonomous vehicles does not require courts or legislators to venture into uncharted territory. From elevator operators to automated braking systems, the law has already consistently demonstrated its capacity to reassign liability when technology displaces human judgment. With fully autonomous vehicles, control resides almost entirely with the manufacturers, engineers, and software developers who design, build, and deploy these systems. Holding them primarily liable for accidents is not a radical proposition, it is the logical conclusion of historical precedent and a legal evolution already well underway. At the same time, preserving residual liability for instances of owner negligence or deliberate misuse ensures the framework remains fair and complete, accounting for those circumstances where an accident follows not from a defect in the product, but from a failure in how it was used. A tiered liability model, grounded in established negligence and product liability principles, would protect injured parties, incentivize manufacturers to prioritize safety, and provide courts with a coherent, precedent-backed structure for resolving disputes.