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Design Accountability: Statutes of Repose, the Missing Inspector, and a Knowledge Gate for the People Who Design Things

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Legal research article.

Written
July 2026
Version
v0.9
Pages
26
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Abstract

Statutes of repose extinguish claims against the designers and builders of things a fixed number of years after completion, regardless of discovery, culpability, or concealment. This Article argues that the doctrine does something worse than deny stale claims: it subsidizes a design strategy. A hazard engineered to fail slowly, hidden where no user can inspect it, will predictably outlast the repose window, and the designer who conceals best is the designer the statute protects most completely. The Article proceeds from a specimen, a Pennsylvania home whose garage slab was built over a concealed void on a single unprotected steel column that corroded for thirty years behind a sealed wall, and generalizes. First, it shows that the finality rationales for repose, lost evidence, faded memory, and fair notice, each collapse when the defendant manufactured the evidentiary silence, and that limitations doctrine already recognizes this through a fraudulent concealment exception that repose alone lacks. Second, it demonstrates that the resulting incentive is not hypothetical by assembling the documented record of design decision concealment across industries: automotive cost benefit suppression, tobacco and asbestos knowledge management, pharmaceutical ghost management, aviation certification concealment, and the built environment itself. Third, it shows that American law already operates downstream harm surveillance in food, motor vehicles, drugs and devices, consumer products, and workplaces, under the closely regulated industry doctrine and mandatory death and injury reporting, and that housing is the conspicuous omission. Drawing on the builder provisions of the Code of Hammurabi as the ancient baseline of unlimited accountability, the Article proposes a knowledge gate as a domain agnostic principle of design accountability: time based liability shields should shelter what could not have been known at the moment of the design decision despite reasonable diligence, and should shelter nothing that was known and concealed. Two transplant reforms follow: a fraudulent concealment carve out in statutes of repose, and early warning reporting for the built environment on the model of 49 U.S.C. § 30166 and Florida’s post collapse milestone inspection statute.

Keywords

  • product liability
  • design defect
  • design accountability
  • statute of repose
  • fraudulent concealment
  • engineering ethics
  • ethical design
  • closely regulated industry
  • consumer protection
  • safety regulation
  • construction defect

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Design Accountability: Statutes of Repose, the Missing Inspector, and a Knowledge Gate for the People Who Design Things." Real Safety AI Foundation Legal Research Article, July 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/f9akhv/

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References (114)

This paper cites its sources in footnotes. Each authority is listed once, where it is first cited, with its footnote number.

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  81. Footnote 56.49 U.S.C. § 30166(m)(3)(C)–(D)
  82. Footnote 56.49 C.F.R. pt. 579.
  83. Footnote 57.49 U.S.C. § 30166(b), (c), (e), (g).
  84. Footnote 58.21 U.S.C. § 360i (device reports)
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  106. Footnote 73.Robert Francis Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon §§ 229–230 (2d ed. 1904)
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  108. Footnote 73.Dennis C. Hendershot & John F. Murphy, Expanding Role of the Loss Prevention Professional, 26 Process Safety Progress 18 (2006).
  109. Footnote 75.Minn. Stat. § 541.051
  110. Footnote 75.Appletree Square, 815 F. Supp. 1266.
  111. Footnote 76.Esener, 240 Ga. App. 21
  112. Footnote 76.Windham, No. 2005-CT-02086-SCT.
  113. Footnote 77.Global-Tech, 563 U.S. 754.
  114. Footnote 81.DeShaney v. Winnebago Cty. Dep’t of Soc. Servs., 489 U.S. 189 (1989) (no affirmative constitutional duty to protect against private harm).

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