[Karunamon]

No, but it was being brewed at the recommended temperature (and still is today, but now the cup is covered in lawyer-safe warnings).

Mickey D's sells at least 500M cups of coffee every day, and this was back in 2006[1]. Given that some high-nineties percentage of those people didn't manage to scald themselves, courts be damned (they're arbitrators of law, not correctness), Liebeck was an idiot. Anyone who puts hot and crushable containers of liquid between their legs isn't acting responsibly.

[1]http://www.franchise-hit.com/franchisors-news-wire/McDonalds...

[Retric]

I don't think you understand what third-degree burns mean see: (third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent) Also she won less than 1Million and much of that went to pay for her attorney they also settled for confidential amount before an appeal was decided. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...

PS: 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.[

[Karunamon]

Severity of the injury does not change my evaluation of the matter seeing as how it was entirely self inflicted.

700 people over 10 years (rough estimate of 1.8 trillion cups if we use the 500M number above) burning themselves isn't even statistically significant.

It sucks, hard, that this lady had to spend the last few years of her life in that kind of pain (skin grafts are no joke), but the idea that it's McD's fault is nuts.

[dragonwriter]

> Severity of the injury does not change my evaluation of the matter seeing as how it was entirely self inflicted.

The jury in the case did not find the injury to be entirely self-inflicted.

People on online, tech-related forums, IME, tend very often to have a much more exclusive view of responsibility than either the law or society at large.

Which probably shouldn't be surprising; its easy to see how exclusive views of responsibility and crisp if/then/else logic can easily appeal to the same aesthetic sense.

[Retric]

Applying the principles of comparative negligence, the jury found that McDonald's was 80% responsible for the incident and Liebeck was 20% at fault.

The principle at work is by selling something vastly more dangerous they were responsible for the extra damage due to increased temperature. In other words at a normal serving temperature she would have suffered but not nearly that much.

PS: The same thing applies in cases like a defective airbag. Yes, the manufacture is not responsible for causing the accident, but they are responsible for increase in damage due to a defect. Or more broadly MD was not responsible for that specific accident, but they know in general terms there would be accidents and they would be making those accidents worse.

[Karunamon]

I get the legal principle, really, I do, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily correct or that I agree with it.