Historical Court Cases

>whether or not it was reasonable to keep the coffee that hot

Keeping coffee that hot was an industry standard and still is.

McDonalds lost because they and their lawyers acted like douchebags in court and the jury sympathised with the old lady, not because of the merits of her case.

>McDonalds lost because they and their lawyers acted like douchebags in court and the jury sympathised with the old lady, not because of the merits of her case.
>Source: my ass

Other documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burned by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.

Source: Gerlin, Andrea (September 1, 1994). "A Matter of Degree: How a Jury Decided that a Coffee Spill is Worth $2.9 Million" (PDF). Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 18, 2015.

>700 people
>Out of all the cups of coffee McDonalds sold in 10 years

To quote from the trial "statistically insignificant"

>Hot beverages such as tea, hot chocolate, and coffee are frequently served at temperatures between 160 degrees F (71.1 degrees C) and 185 degrees F (85 degrees C).
>ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18226454

Coffee is still kept that hot.

Less than 25 years ago. Not history

sage

lol didn't this lady have to get skin grafts and shit because the burns were so bad? Coffee doesn't need to be boiling to be kept hot. Fucking McDonald's shills ITT

see me post
it's not just about the temperature but the fact that the cup was poorly designed to handle a dangerously hot liquid and that the customers were not sufficiently aware of the danger they wer in.

>700 preventable burns
>statistically insignificant
I wish Veeky Forums had a spoiler image so I could post what "burns" actually look like.

>Hot beverages such as tea, hot chocolate, and coffee are frequently served at temperatures between 160 degrees F (71.1 degrees C) and 185 degrees F (85 degrees C).
You just made the case against McDonald's.
>McDonald's operations manual required the franchisee to hold its coffee at 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit.

>At 190 °F (88 °C), the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds.

> Liebeck's lawyers presented the jury with evidence that 180 °F (82 °C) coffee like that McDonald's served may produce third-degree burns (where skin grafting is necessary) in about 12 to 15 seconds. Lowering the temperature to 160 °F (71 °C) would increase the time for the coffee to produce such a burn to 20 seconds. Liebeck's attorneys argued that these extra seconds could provide adequate time to remove the coffee from exposed skin, thereby preventing many burns.

Her decision to put the cup of coffee between her legs in a car (parked though, contrary to the myth) and her choice of clothes contributed more to her injuries than cup design.

McDonald should have settled, not acknowledged liability but paid for her medical bills. She didn't deserve more.

Crawford v. Washington has always been an interesting case for me. It is a good example of a decision that had much wider implications than the circumstances of the case itself. The Supreme Court ruled that an audio recording could NOT be submitted into evidence unless the person who produced the audio recording was present for the trial itself so that she could be cross-examined. This case happened in 2004. It didn't seem like a huge deal at the time, but it had HUGE implications for how forensic evidence is handled.

Before then, it was possible for a forensic investigator to simply submit a report in writing which would then be used as evidence during the trial, without the investigator actually having to show up in court. This was confirmed during the 2008 case, Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, where it was explicitly spelled out that "the analysts who write reports that the prosecution introduces must be made available for confrontation." Through these two cases, the Confrontation Clause, a long-ignored constitutional right for a defendant to "be confronted with the witnesses against him" was brought back from extinction.

The counter to statistics is not an emotive picture m8.

>Liebacks lawyers said
Is actually bullshit.
>When tap water reaches 140º F, it can cause a third degree (full thickness) burn in just five seconds.
>burnfoundation.org/programs/resource.cfm?c=1&a=3

The risk is not significantly lowered by dropping the coffee to a less palatable temperature.

Coffee is still served that hot today. Industry standard is to brew at 200 and serve at 180.

Are there any good academic papers on how juries tend to assess legal damages? I'm particularly wondering what sorts of cases they tend to be exceedingly generous in compensation and what types of cases they tend to be more stingy, or if there are no great statistical patterns and it all depends on the type of jury selected.

Geography is a humanity

No it was because of the burns were on her worn genitals

>quoting a guy who sold out to make blacks in his novel funny Xdddd

You seem to be consistently missing the point that it's not a question of whether she's the one who hurt herself or not, the point is that the coffee being sold posed a serious injury hazard that would not be reasonably expected by the average consumer.

I mean yeah, my first reaction when hearing of this case was "well duh, coffee is hot you dumb bitch," but the actual injuries go well beyond what I initially assumed to be "just" some burns, and I'm certain they were far more serious than what most people would have imagined a coffee burn to be.

>not be reasonably expected by the average consumer

If I knew a cup of fucking coffee was hot enough to burn my flesh clean off, I would never be buying it in the first place.

>dude's wife is murdered
>he gets blamed
>sentenced to death
>dies
>turns out it was some other dude
>death penalty is removed from Britain

>Does this belong more in Veeky Forums?

Veeky Forums is a shit board where people try to rip off out of their literal pennies gains by shilling imaginary coins that won't be worth a shit within the year.

200 fucking degrees.

Why was it that hot? That's not normal temperature for coffee.

>the plantiff was (((Stella Liebeck)))

I don't know of any papers, and I don't actually deal with personal injury cases myself, but I have a few colleagues who do, and it's an article of faith that jurors who have never sat on a jury before give more generous damages assessments.

That affects the quote, how?

Farenheit. That's ~90' celcius.

Miller v Jackson will always have a dear place in my heart due to mai boi Deming's glorious speech about how GOAT cricket is.

Otherwise, my second favourite would be Bradshaw v Unity Marine. I love it when Judges shit all over lawyers, and this one is legendary for that.

However, if I had to pick a "serious" case, I'd go for Hamed & Ors v R. Basically the court ruled that video evidence obtained from criminal trespass by the police was inadmissible. It helped to constrain the Police Force to what they were legally allowed to do (even though Parliament just changed the law after the fact), and I just like it for some reason I can't quite explain.

>Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
>Overrated

>MFW

Who the fuck said this?

190 F. is not an industry standard. The company that had the service contract on that MacDonald's advised them that it was a Bad Idea, and refused their technicians to refuse service on any coffee maker turned that high.

>Otherwise, my second favourite would be Bradshaw v Unity Marine. I love it when Judges shit all over lawyers, and this one is legendary for that.
Is that the one where one (or more?) of the briefs were written in crayon? I vaguely remember that name, but I can't connect it to anything.

>citation desperately needed

ofcourse she does, how are you supposed to hold a paper mug with 200 degree coffee in it?

It was part of the discovery during the lawsuit. I believe the docu 'Hot Coffee' references it and provides an online source. Sorry, I am not on my home computer. MacDonald received similar warnings from the company that made the styrofoam cups and the one that made the lids.

That's the one, although it's the Judge saying that their submissions were so shit that both counsels must have drafted their submissions on the back of a handkerchief in crayon, and entered into a secret agreement (complete with hats and secret handshakes) to misguide the court.

I think one counsel didn't even submit any authorities, and the one that did cited only one that was cited incorrectly. It just such a cluster fuck.

Actually, I've just remembered another case from my last moot: Chinese Herald Ltd v New Times Media Ltd. Features a defendant missing 3 or 4 deadlines for defense submissions, representing themselves and claims that another newspaper advocates open murder in the streets. Fucking fantastic read desu.

There was a US Supreme Court decision in the 1890s in which a guy who imported tomatoes into the US said he didn't have to pay tariffs on it because it was a fruit and not a vegetable.

The court decided that a tomato was indeed a fruit, but for the sake of tariffs it was a vegetable.

You're overstating things - the "industry standard" is to brew BETWEEN 180 and 205 and serve BETWEEN ~160 and 180 degrees F. You're also apparently under the impression that "industry standard" is some kind of magical spell that protects you from lawsuits, but it's not; if the temperature you brew your coffee at & the design of the cups poses a substantial hazard, you're going to get sued, and you're going to lose.

Other retailers like Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks and Burger King frequently get sued for serving beverages hot enough to cause severe burns as well. Not just coffee, but tea, hot chocolate, and cider, too. Hell, this isn't even the only McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit - not even close. They don't always lose, but they often do (Or more often, they simply settle out of court for a big fucking chunk of money. The reason the Liebeck lawsuit is famous, by the way, is that McDonalds for some reason refused to do that, and ended up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars more than Liebeck was actually seeking.)

When you serve coffee in a paper cup, meant to be consumed in a car, with a very tight lid that needs to be pried open to add the sugar packets and cream that you provided, IF THAT COFFEE SPILLS (because it is GOING to spill sometimes), it should not cause third degree burns requiring skin grafts. The fact that it's an "industry standard" is not a reliable defense when you're endangering your customers.

>Yiddish speaking socialists
kek

So almost boiling. Because that's normal coffee, right?

I wanna see the pictures.

Could somebody talk of Nuremberg trials?

[spoiler]
>Nuremberg
>berg
>BERG
[/spoiler]

20 lbs of flesh is about 40 cups, or 2.5 gallons. You're telling me 8oz, 1 cup, of near boiling liquid destroyed 2.5 gallons worth of old woman pussy and thighs? Bullshit. Something's not right somewhere OP.

You do realize that 700 accidents in the past 10 years in every McDonalds is going to give you a rate of 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% accidents per day right?

You do not want to see the images.

McShill is loving it.

>measuring flesh in gallons
Literally what?

But yeah, dude - I'm sure the hospital gave her excessive skin grafts as part of a nefarious plot to screw McDonalds out of $20,000 (the amount she originally asked for), to be divided up equally amongst the doctors.

>it was 200 degrees
>we had a thermometer to measure the temperature at the moment of the burn
>ignoring 200 degrees is the average temperature to brew coffee

Americans have always hated taxes, what do you expect?

Gave the Soviets nuclear parity which would ultimately reshape the Cold War and world politics.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

>Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were United States citizens who were executed on June 19, 1953 after being convicted of committing espionage for the Soviet Union. They were accused of selling the United States' top secret plans for building a nuclear bomb to the Soviet Union. At the time, the United States was the sole country in the world with the knowledge and resources to build nuclear bombs.

>They also were accused of providing top-secret radar, sonar, and jet propulsion engines to the Soviet Union.[1][2][3]

>Other convicted co-conspirators were imprisoned, including Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who supplied documents from Los Alamos to Julius and who served 10 years of his 15-year sentence; Harry Gold, who identified Greenglass and served 15 years in Federal prison as the courier for Greenglass. Klaus Fuchs, a German scientist working in Los Alamos and handled by Gold, provided vastly more important information. He served nine years and four months, convicted in Great Britain.[4][5]

I love how wikipedia identifies Fuchs as German in the opening summary but fails to note all the other conspirators were Jews until later. Funny innit?

Are you being obtuse on purpose or by accident?

BREWING coffee at that temperature does not mean that you have to SERVE it at that temperature, and if you do, the container should accommodate that in some way to minimize risk. Yes, beyond just slapping a useless warning on it saying "lol, coffee's hot btw." For instance, designing a lid that you can easily add cream/sugar through without having to prize it off in your car with the cup held inches above your body.

There are steps that McDonalds (and other retailers) could take to prevent incidents like this or at least lessen their frequency and they've chosen not to, because, frankly, it's cheaper (and certainly vastly easier) to just pay a couple tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars every now and then as a settlement then you get hit with this year's lawsuit. Companies make that kind of calculus all the time. But if they do, the lawsuits are part of the package deal, and they are not "frivolous."

Famous bootlegger in Cincinnati Ohio, cops can't do shit to him just pays them off. Wife tries to get a divorce, on the way to finalize the papers George runs her cab off the road and shoots her in broad daylight next to a park next to 20 witnesses. he owned all the cops and got list of jurors and payed them off, didn't go to jail, showed how corrupt system was

I still hear people saying that the Rosenbergs were executed unfairly. Their reasoning usually goes along the lines of 'something something reds under the beds, something something witchhunt'. The underlying attitude being that communist sympathisers act out of good intentions, and if it might sometimes have negative consequences they were just too naive and pure to cope with the real world (while fascist sympathisers are all just evil).

Those people gave the power to build weapons that could kill HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE to a monster like Stalin. They were literally responsible for bringing humanity to the brink of the apocalypse. In my view it was probably the most justified execution in history, ever. And I mean in all of history. The only shame is that their co-conspirators didn't go with them.

kek

>Wife tries to get a divorce, on the way to finalize the papers George runs her cab off the road and shoots her in broad daylight next to a park next to 20 witnesses
In fairness, his wife did steal all his money and hired a hitman to kill him

>Their reasoning usually goes along the lines of 'something something reds under the beds, something something witchhunt'.
Dude, the key witness literally admitted he committed perjury when he gave the testimony that implicated them, and the whole trial was mismanaged in a dozen different ways.

Don't get me wrong, without a doubt Julius was guilty (Ethel, well, that's murky) but the thing about the rule of law in a democratic country is that it's not enough to know that somebody's guilty, you also have to prove that they're guilty in a fair trial, and their trial was botched. That's why people say they were unfairly executed. What's that famous quote about them? They were both guilty and framed?

There's also the fact that the information they passed to the Soviets was of marginal value. Other people passed extremely valuable data to the Soviets, but not them (and even without any of them the Soviets would have eventually developed the bomb regardless). They didn't
>give the power to build weapons that could kill HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE to a monster like Stalin
- with or without the Rosenbergs, the Soviets would have had the bomb about when they did. They simply weren't key players in the atomic espionage program.

>Look up pictures of Stella Liebeck
Oh my God. That poor woman.

They also prevented the US from using nuclear weapons that would have killed "HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE" whenever they felt like it.

What if the Soviets hadn't had nuclear weapons? What would have stopped the US from nuking China during the Korean war? Or Cuba? or the Soviet Union?

The US and possibly NATO being the only nations to have nuclear weapons is more dangerous than the Russians and Chinese having them.

>drink pure vinegar because it's called Vinegar wine
>throat is fucked and have to breathe through a tube
>sue TESCOS for millions despite NHS paying for all bills

25 year rule, motherfucker.

>get boiling hot coffee
>drink it while driving in your car
>spill coffee and burn yourself
>the legislative rather forces warning signs on coffee cups than making it illegal to be a retard at the steering wheel

all accidents are avoidable and unnecessary

you might think differently about this if you had been one of the victims

>Those people gave the power to build weapons that could kill HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE to a monster like Stalin.
remind me again, which countries have ever actually used nuclear weapons in anger? Was it the soviet union under Stalin?

>out of anger

Yeah okay

Everyone knows that that coffee is far too hot to drink safely when it has first been served.

if you're going to order a hot beveragemade with near boiling water (because that is how you make coffee ) you need to take responsibility for making sure you don't get burned.

ANY time you make coffee and pour it in a cup there is potential for you burning yourself.

"paper" coffee mugs aren't just one layer of paper. they're designed to be heat insuators so you can hold it

They weren't driving but who the fuck holds coffee in between their legs, all cars have this thing called a cup holder
There's a difference between complaining about Irish terrorism and faulty wires burning your house down

9/10 post my dude.

You do realize that if I murder one random McDonalds customer every year, that gives you a rate of 0.0000000000000000000000000000001% murders per customer, right?

>brewing = serving

Last night I had a pizza that had to be in the oven at 250 degrees celcius. Guess at what temperature I ate it?

Guess when McDonald's expects you to drink it

The cup design was bad and the jury took into consideration the reasonable amount of fault the plaintiff had in the incident, 20%.

McDonald's had had over 700 prior burn incidents for unreasonably hot coffee, cups too hot to hold, and so on (200f was the official policy, at the time. Milk curdles and it can cause 3rd degree burns. That is unreasonable) which went unheeded and unresolved.

The jury wanted to send a message to companies like McDona;d's, fining them one day's worth of their coffee sales. McDonald's appealed the decision and the judge later lowered the amount of damages, if I remember correctly.

cont.

Do you have your home coffee maker make coffee right into the cup, then take a sip of it moments after the brew is done?

After its served? They have burgers ready and waiting until someone orders them. There is absolutely no need to serve the coffee right after its brewed.

Corporations, fearing further precedent-setting lawsuits against them, launched a massive public relations campaign to belittle and ridicule anyone suing a corporation.

Paying public relations firms to invent terms such as "lawsuit lottery", and lobby for "tort reform", these corporations were able to convince much of the public to support laws directly against their best interests.

Now, many statutory caps exist regarding the amount of damages which can be legally awarded to a victim. This has gone so far that even medical malpractice has come under the "tort reform" umbrella, with hospitals and doctors banding together to lobby for statutory caps in all states, even sending lying letters to their long-time patients, claiming they'd have to close their practice if the patients didn't vote in the reforms.

To put it plainly, you can now have a leg wrongly amputated and be awarded no more than $120 thousand dollars, by law, which the defendant will then appeal and obstruct the awarding of, until you only have $75 thousand, years later, which mostly goes to legal fees.

That's why I disagree with

>Those people gave the power to build weapons that could kill HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE to a monster like Stalin
Based on this Oppenheimer should have been executed for giving nuclear power to a monster like Roosevelt

I don't drink coffee, I have got chocolate and tea, I put the kettle to boil, mix it in as soon as it's gone, then take it to my desk and sit down, then drink when needed, testing with a spoon at first.
I fail to see the problem with this method
Then burgers would complain about cold coffee like they complain about not enough ketchup

The only reason it burned her so much in the first place is because it got stuck in her old granny diapers or some shit.

Source but it makes sense

There's a difference between burning your tongue or your skin a little from spilt coffee and suffering severe burns that require skin grafting. Nobody in their right mind would ever imagine that coffee could do that.

Oh yeah m8, I just splash my tea around willy nilly.

Perfectly fucking harmless this boiling water.

That's what I'm saying. People know hot coffee can burn you but, again, we usually associate 3rd degree burns with children spilling boiling water all over themselves and not from a cup of coffee one drinks while on the go.

It wasn't a diaper. She was wearing tight sweatpants, which absorbed the liquid and held it against her skin.

>McDonald's had had over 700 prior burn incidents

Statistically insignificant. 700 over 10 years in every McDonalds restaurant is nothing.

>unreasonably hot coffee

Untrue. We continue to serve coffee today at around 180 (which was the rough temp that the coffee was)

>The jury wanted to send a message to companies l

The Jury were fuckwits who got butthurt because McDonalds didn't show enough compassion to an old lady.

>we usually associate 3rd degree burns with children spilling boiling water all over themselves

Replace child with old lady and that is literally what happened.

Excellent post

...From a kitchen stove with parents not watching, a context where the parents are responsible because they knew the danger but weren't vigilant enough. On the other hand this lady was handed a product she didn't expect to give her third degree burns.

>Statistically insignificant. 700 over 10 years in every McDonalds restaurant is nothing.
So just because something's a statistic means that it's permissible to accept permanent disfigurement in several hundreds of customers and take no action to prevent it?

...

>700 prior burn incidents
Does the average american mentally develop past the age of 5? I don't normally side with big business on consumer disputes, but this is next level. How exactly is McDick responsible for retarded burger's lack of basic motor functions.

>1994
reported

its like 97 C, dude

>the Jews being overly involved in Communism and Bolshevism is a /pol/ meme

To add to this, she originally seeked only ~$20,000 for the expenses she had to pay for and will pay. Instead McDonald offered $800.

$800 for losing 20% of body weight through skin grafting, 20% of skin/body was burned (groin area).

Were corporates really that inhumane, greedy and arrogant at that time?

There is a world of difference between "hot" coffee and fucking scalding hot coffee.

They could have served it at half the temperature it was and it still would have been "hot coffee" without also melting through your fucking dick in case of an accident.

You're trying to play devil's advocate because this is Veeky Forums, but you're failing.

Then why is that the temperature used everywhere? Should they have served it at half temperature because it was an old lady?