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How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

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Re: How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

#141

Post by nthj »

avalaunch wrote: post #85
crusso wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so let's say it's 165F and I spill a cup on someone. There's still going to be an injury. Scalding burns can occur at temperatures down to 125F or so. Whose fault is it? Does Starbucks have to lower the temperature of the coffee they're serving to maybe 115F in order to avoid responsibility? If I spill it in someone's eye, that may still cause an injury. Does Starbucks need to serve their hot coffee at 98.6F? I…

I think it comes down to expectations. There's an expectation when you buy a drink that it will be served at a drinkable temperature. True, there's also an expectation when you buy coffee that it will be served at a temperature hot enough to cause injuries if you spill it on yourself. But the expectation is that those injuries will be first or perhaps second degree burns, certainly not third. Had that been the case,…

> But if instead Walmart were selling guns preloaded without warning the customers that there were bullets already in the guns, I would argue that Walmart would be at least some percentage at fault when some percentage of their customers inevitably shot themselves or others

I see your point, but I think it might be worth clarifying that despite Walmart's probable liability, this would in no way indemnify their customers; the first rule of gun safety is RESPECT EVERY GUN AS LOADED until disassembled into its component parts, no exceptions.

Re: How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

#142

Post by chimeracoder »

marcosdumay wrote: post #134
nemo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the actual trial history. Your analogies don't reflect what actually happened, which is why you can't understand it. Liebeck was hospitalized for 8 days with multiple skin grafts. She asked asked McDonalds for medical expenses from the injury from the coffee and lost wages ( At that point she got an attorney. They tried to settle. McDonalds refused. In the trial it came out that McDonalds had more than 700 repor…

You mean, from the several million people they served coffee every month, 700 accidents happened? What coffee is not a burn hazard?

Before you jump to that conclusion, please take a look at the actual pictures of Liebeck's burns.

I'm not going to link to them directly because they're very gruesome (as well as slightly NSFW[0]), but if you Google "mcdonalds coffee burn", they're the first things that pop up. We're talking burns far beyond anything I assume (hope) you've ever experienced.

This case in particular is one that irks me, because it's very easy to distort the facts (and ignore McDonald's wilful negligence, which was mentioned above[1]).

[0] You can see her vagina, because the burns were between her legs - though trust me, that's not the part of the picture that will grab your attention.

[1] Note that the jury awarded punitive damages - this means that above and beyond the damages owed to Liebeck, they determined that McDonalds needed to be punished financially for their actions; this is a much higher bar than the "typical" civil suit.

Re: How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

#144

Post by crusso »

DanBC wrote: post #133
gambiting wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would be just as bad if she spilled home made coffee using water from her own kettle. But then there would be no uproar then, would there? Or would she go and sue the maker of the kettle for making water so hot?

Your comparison is flawed. She did not get a McDonalds kettle and pour just boiled water onto herself. She asked for a cup of coffee, paid, took the coffee out to the car and got in the passenger seat. They drove for a short while. They stopped the car. She removed the lid and spilled the coffee. A more fair comparison would be if she had poured her boiled kettle into a mug, carried that through to another room, and…

McDonalds wanted it to stay hot for the duration of the journey

Because McDonalds customers want the coffee to stay hot for the duration of the journey and all customers know that coffee is very hot and they need to be careful with it.

Re: How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

#145

Post by brownbat »

tzs wrote: post #36

"Tort reform" can seriously screw over people, because the parties that tend to favor tort reform (by which they mean greatly limiting the ability of people to sue and/or the amount they can win if they do sue) also tend to favor limiting government regulation and oversight. That can leave nothing to compensate for the removal of the deterrence factor that the threat of lawsuits provides against bad corporate or prof…

Yeah, tort reform usually seeks to limit the punitive damages designed to make large institutions actually notice when they lose a lawsuit.

Without such penalties, there's a reduced incentive for administrators to notice that, say, surgeons are frequently leaving scalpels in patients. [1]

I get that people have an adverse reaction to plaintiffs striking it rich (not that they really are). But what tort reformers don't realize is that the perceived unfairness of jackpot lawsuits might actually be discouraging juries from using punitive damage amounts that would actually change corporate behavior.

We might get more appropriate incentives for businesses if we said, "Ok, the plaintiff gets made whole, even for pain and suffering, maybe the lawyers get paid, but after that, punitives go to the state." The state could use the funds to educate or prevent harms similar to whatever most of the lawsuits are about, or set up a fund to compensate others harmed by the most common dangerous practices.

It'd lead to damage awards that could actually change business behavior, fewer perceptions of unjust plaintiff enrichment, and a better balance sheet for the state or state programs designed to reduce the harms all at the same time.

[1] http://www.everydayhealth.com/healthy-living/surgeons-leave-...

Re: How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

#147

Post by sumedh »

nemo wrote: post #81
crusso wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm still someone who doesn't get it. Coffee is brewed hot (195 - 205 degrees F), and I personally like it to be freshly brewed as I drink it. As I very carefully sipped my fresh Starbucks coffee today at the mall, I was very conscious of the fact that I had a hot beverage in my hand. If I had accidentally spilled the coffee on myself or others it could have caused some serious burns... who else's fault would…

Read the actual trial history. Your analogies don't reflect what actually happened, which is why you can't understand it. Liebeck was hospitalized for 8 days with multiple skin grafts. She asked asked McDonalds for medical expenses from the injury from the coffee and lost wages ( At that point she got an attorney. They tried to settle. McDonalds refused. In the trial it came out that McDonalds had more than 700 repor…

> punitive damages of the profits of two day's sales of coffee (which the judge reduced)

Why did the judge reduce the penalty and what is the point of the jury giving a penalty fee which the judge can reduce later?

Re: How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

#148

Post by crusso »

chimeracoder wrote: post #142
marcosdumay wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, from the several million people they served coffee every month, 700 accidents happened? What coffee is not a burn hazard?

Before you jump to that conclusion, please take a look at the actual pictures of Liebeck's burns. I'm not going to link to them directly because they're very gruesome (as well as slightly NSFW[0]), but if you Google "mcdonalds coffee burn", they're the first things that pop up. We're talking burns far beyond anything I assume (hope) you've ever experienced. This case in particular is one that irks me, because it's ve…

Before you jump to that conclusion, please take a look at the actual pictures of Liebeck's burns.

At least two people in this thread want me to stare at grisly pictures. Yes, they're awful. I sympathize with the lady for having to go through that pain.

That said, I can point you to grisly pictures of car accidents, gun accidents, and animal attacks all day. What does that have to do with understanding the nature of responsibility in our society and the impact of transferring responsibility for all accidents to the providers of products and services that are giving consumers exactly what they're asking for.

Good to-go coffee is served hot. That's what consumers want. That's what I want. What do you think that lady would have done all those years ago if McDonalds had served her some 115F coffee? My guess is that most people would take it back and ask for hot coffee.

As a matter of ethics, I espouse maximizing individual liberty and consumer choice. It's a bad thing to saddle everyone with lowest-common-denominator products and services because an extraordinarily small minority of people are unable to make decent decisions.

Re: How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

#149

Post by chimeracoder »

crusso wrote: post #148
chimeracoder wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before you jump to that conclusion, please take a look at the actual pictures of Liebeck's burns. I'm not going to link to them directly because they're very gruesome (as well as slightly NSFW[0]), but if you Google "mcdonalds coffee burn", they're the first things that pop up. We're talking burns far beyond anything I assume (hope) you've ever experienced. This case in particular is one that irks me, because it's ve…

Before you jump to that conclusion, please take a look at the actual pictures of Liebeck's burns. At least two people in this thread want me to stare at grisly pictures. Yes, they're awful. I sympathize with the lady for having to go through that pain. That said, I can point you to grisly pictures of car accidents, gun accidents, and animal attacks all day. What does that have to do with understanding the nature of r…

I asked you to look at the pictures because you seemed unfamiliar with the details of the case - and when you're drawing an opinion about a legal case, details really matter.

The fact that you say that this is a matter of "an extraordinarily small minority of people [who] are unable to make decent decisions"[0] leads me to believe that you still don't understand the details of this specific case - including details pointed out elsewhere in this thread (let alone available elsewhere online).

We're not talking about some hypothetical woman with hypothetically hot coffee from a hypothetical company - we're talking about a specific incident in which the facts are actually very readily available.

[0] You also draw a completely false dichotomy when it comes to "individual liberty and customer choice", since that's actually not the issue that was litigated here. If you want to find out the issue that was actually litigated, I'd invite you to read up on the case to the point where you understand that the temperature of the coffee itself wasn't actually the reason that the jury awarded the punitive damages (the civil damages, yes, but not the punitive damages).

Re: How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment

#150

Post by stuki »

jemfinch wrote: post #113
stuki wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what kind of reputation, do you think an Amazon seller who makes potential customers sign "no review" contracts, will get? There's nothing magical about the medical field, that makes approaches developed elsewhere somewhat irrelevant there. It's just another fee for service arrangement. Although many Doctors do like to fancy themselves as special snowflakes.

> There's nothing magical about the medical field, that makes approaches developed elsewhere somewhat irrelevant there. There absolutely is something different about medicine: consumers' participation in the medical market is involuntary . We don't see doctors because we want to see doctors, we see doctors because if we don't, we will be maimed or killed by disease or dysfunction. By the time people are seeking a doc…

Outside of emergency rooms and acute care, people have quite a bit of choice as to when to see a doctor, and whom to see. It is conceptually little different than auto repair in that sense. Making the world artificially black and white only serves to obscure nuances. Some times you really could use some help right now, most of the time not. The efficient way to deal with the former, is to plan ahead and make arrangements. For the latter, YAGNY may well be the efficient approach.

Heck, even someone rendering services as conceptually involuntary as a will executor, can have a reputation fr being good or bad. Despite you not necessarily having much choice on the matter when the headline service is being rendered.

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