OK, how 'bout a law library and a .pdf on burns.
I meant to use this link for the law library.
pssst CB we convinced him that the burns would happen at the McD’s temps, but now he’s going with it was inevitable, vs. negligence.
I failed to notice that the Law Library was using the same ATLA reference.
Oh, and wring I doubt I can convince anyone on this, but I do like to keep the facts straight.
CB, I don’t know whose “law library” it is. But I do note that there article is excerpted from the Trial Lawyers one that you posted earlier - were you unaware of this?
I have not taken a position on burns/temperature in this thread or elsewhere, contrary to certain people’s opinion. Others, OTOH, seem to take varying positions at will, as long as they can indict the Evil Mean Corporation.
CB - sorry, I did not see your post (took that long for my post to go through, believe it or not - came back to the computer to see yours ahead of me).
Izzy: “I am (unsurprisingly) unclear of Mandelstam’s post saying that “Izzy now implies” etc. - this was in fact the subject of my first post to this thread. What’s more bizarre is that someone could claim that they were unaware that tort reform is a subtext of the coffee verdict debate - the coffee verdict is frequently invoked as Exhibit A in arguments as to why this country needs tort reform. Very simple, really - to the extent that you buy in to the notion that we are being subjected to rediculous court decisions, it would suggest a need for tort reform. To the extent that one believes that we are not being subjected to rediculous court decisions, that need is called into question. Decisions such a the coffee one are evidence, or not.”
Izzy, all due apologies for having missed your first post on this lengthy and active thread. Perhaps you can tell me what page it’s on if you think it is important for me to look at it.
That aside, no, it really hadn’t crystalized for me that anyone in this thread was trying to make a clearcut case for tort reform based on this particular case. The reason is simple: I think it’s been made abudantly clear that anyone making that case wouldn’t have much of a leg to stand on.
If it’s true that the coffee verdict is “frequently invoked” to support tort reform, then that is itself Exhibit A for how woefully misleading such arguments are. The real stakes in tort reform include medical malpractice, a patient’s right to sue an HMO, a community’s or state’s right to sue environmental polluters. These are serious issues and I don’t think we’ve been debating them here.
In other words, if what you report is true then the McDonald’s case is being used by tort reform propagandists in a deliberately misleading way: 1) because much more is at stake in tort reform that the ability to recover damages for an unsusual and relatively minor personal injury suit of this kind; and 2) because, as has been demonstrated over and again, the verdict was not in the least ridiculous once one understands the relevant facts and legal issues.
But, hey, if you want to insist that this case provides evidence for radical judicial overhaul, despite everything that you have read here, that is your choice.
As to the matter of your surprise–or lack of–regarding my last post, please do edify me. It is always my intention to be as clear as possible when I post on the SDMB so if you’d like to make the case for “unsurprising” unclarity on my part, I am all ears.
Right, Izzy, I’ve got it in for McD’s, ever since that night with Grimace and Ronald and the McNuggets.
Couldn’t possibly be that I would like to see one entity admit responsability for injuring some one and compensate them for the damage they did. Couldn’t possibly be that I’m a bit tired of hearing (as we did on page one) ‘gee, anyone who’s stupid enough to pour coffee in their groin deserves to get burned’.
couldn’t possibly be because I also get tired of hearing ‘duh, coffee hot. coffe burn’ as we did on page one, when I personally know what a super-hot water spill over a significant part of your body feels like, and recall specifically all the people who commented to me about how they really knew how bad it was 'cause they scalded their finger and it throbed for hours. yep. has to be that I’m agin the evil corporate magnets.
Seems that while you decry people ascribing a position to you, you have no philisophical problem doing the worse by ascribing motivation. Since you seem to absolutely refuse to state a position, it seems appropriate for us to take stabs at it.
Oh and James, forgot to say thanks for the thumbs-up on my laywoman’s understanding of tort law.
Actually, no. I don’t think it is important for you to look at, or comment on, this or any of my other posts.
And that opinion wouldn’t happen to be a function of your position in this debate, would it? Purely a coincidence, no doubt.
Calm down there, wring. If you can’t take a jab, then don’t make them yourself. Or, if you do, at least make a better one.
“And that opinion wouldn’t happen to be a function of your position in this debate, would it? Purely a coincidence, no doubt”
Well, Iz, my “position in this debate” is simply this: after having seen several knowledgeable lawyers, esp. Jodi and Sua, devote lengthy and informative posts to the substantive questions at hand, I conclude that Beagle was right when he said that McDonald’s should have settled.
I further conclude that the case for the absurdity of the verdict has been vigorously rebutted and re-rebutted; indeed, the mere fact that the merits of this case have been debated at such length, and by such intelligent people, in itself suggests that what we have here is, to be sure, a debatable but not an absurd decision. From this premise I further conclude that this is not a case on which one can easily predicate an argument that the need for tort reform is self-evident.
But if you feel that I lack objectivity perhaps you can take the time to concisely summarize what you see as being the key buttresses of the argument that a) the McD’s outcome was absurd and b) a broken legal system in need of dramatic reform is thereby demonstrated.
Perhaps he was right. I don’t see any relevance in this fact, as I’ve noted earlier.
Hmm…perhaps you should have seen my first post after all… The argument that the verdict was correct under current law does not imply that tort reform is not needed - it only implies that current laws support the verdict. To the extent that one believes that this type of verdict is wrong, the argument that it is correct under current law is itself a call for tort reform.
Beyond this, you seem to be saying that the very fact that some people think something is reasonable is proof that it is reasonable - a logic that escapes me.
No need for that - you’ll be OK, I’m sure. I don’t happen to have a strong opinion on this case (though my symphathies lean towards McD). There are several pages of arguments here from some intelligent posters that have failed to convince you - I don’t imagine that I’d add anything that you’d find worthwhile. My only point was that with your symphathies in the case being what they are, it is pointless for you to declare that someone making the opposite case has no leg to stand on.
Izzy, I can’t devote any more time to this thread right now–but I promise to look in again sometime tomorrow and, when I do so, to look for your first post. It would help, though, if you’d say right now what you mean by “this type of verdict” being wrong. That’s a bit too vague a conception for me to understand your meaning. In other words, what “type” of verdict/case are we talking about here? It would also help if you’d say what page the post in question was on.
That is nothing more than your naked opinion, which has already been contradicted by the facts presented in this thread.
I looked on pp. 1, 2 and 3, and couldn’t find it. Little help, please?
The plaintiff suffered severe burns. McDonalds knew from past experience such a thing was possible, albeit highly improbable. Legally, the improbability is almost irrelevant - the injuries were forseeable and preventable.
I hope everyone realizes that the plaintiff was found 30% liable. That has not been mentioned in a page or two. The best argument for McDonalds is that the plaintiff’s own negligence was probably half responsible for the accident. However, the burns she suffered were a direct result of the temperature of the coffee. I am not saying that the danger was so great that McDonalds had to lower the temperature of their coffee. That is a judgment call. There is plenty of evidence that their coffee was within the range of normalcy - at the high end though. I am saying that when McDonalds coffee seriously injured people, absent facts indicating that someone did something really bizarre, they needed to open their wallets. And they did - but not this time. That is the strangest fact of all.
McDonalds should have paid the medical bills. I know that McDonalds did not intend to injure the plaintiff in this case. But McDonalds could not say that the injuries were unique, unforseeable, or impossible to prevent without ruining the product completely.
My legal bottom line: products liability law is moving away from fault and towards compensating the injured. If your business knows that a product may cause serious injury when used in a fairly normal fashion, do everything to reduce the risk without ruining the utility of the product and prepare to pay for the injuries. This was not a case of someone reaching into the blades of a running lawnmower to clear an obstruction. This was moderately stupid behavior on the part of the plaintiff. Moderately stupid is forseeable. Who has not been moderately stupid at one time or another? So, we cannot shift ALL of the blame onto the plaintiff. Therefore, to me, this whole debate comes down to nitpicking between 30-50%.
I don’t think this case was an example of the legal system out of control. I do think the punitive damages were ridiculous. Of course, McDonalds could have avoided any punitive damages by settling out of court. And, as has been stated before, the punitive damages were reduced on appeal. Not enough, IMO, but what could the appellate court do? They do not retry the case. They give great deference to the juries findings and look at the law. The legal test*, injuries, temperature evidence, and poor testimony by a McDonald’s representative hung McDs out where they could get nailed. The jury nailed them.
Bottom of all bottom lines: expect to see this case on many future law school exams. It is full of facts and arguments for both sides. What page are we on now? Six? Obviously nothing is obvious about this case. That’s it for me.
*I posted the test I think was used at the bottom of a post at the top of a recent page. The last two parts of the test really do not favor businesses in the case of a serious preventable injury.
Mandelstam said:
I agree with this completely. The problem is that this is a polarizing case - people on McDonald’s side think this case is the absolute height of absurdity, while people on the plaintiff’s side tend to take the attitude that McDonalds behaved outrageously and their guilt was blatantly obvious to anyone who has studied the facts in the case.
The truth is that there are facts that can support both sides, as well as empirical evidence for both sides (on the one hand, McDonalds own people found that other similar restaraunts were serving cooler coffee, but on the other, there is a raft of evidence from the coffee industry that McDonalds was serving it at the exactly right temperature for best flavor).
On the one hand, we have seven hundred people who have been injured to some degree by McDonalds coffee, and evidence that McDonalds knew about it and did nothing. But then, we also have the fact that 700 out of 10 billion is such a small number that the complaints could have easily fallen into the ‘noise’ of tens of thousands of other complaints and small settlements. and a reasonable position can be taken that the number of cases is so small that no change is warranted.
So this jury found for the plaintiff, but another jury in an almost identical case found for the defendant, with the appeals court actually stating the main points made by some of us in this case (that hot coffee is a well understood danger, and that the industry standard serving temperature is right where McDonald’s was serving it).
By the way, that second case involved a ‘Bunn’ coffee maker. I’m familiar with them. The ones I have used do not have a temperature adjustment, which means that every restaraunt that uses them is serving their coffee at 185 degrees, the same as McDonalds. And let me tell you, those Bunn coffeemakers are everywhere.
So why might other fast food restaraunts serve cooler coffee? here’s one reason - because some types of coffee production involve serving the hot coffee right out of spigots in the machine (McDonalds), while others involve large coffee makers that fill ‘air pots’, and the coffee served out of them may have been sitting for a while. The average temperature in these places is probably somewhat lower, assuming that the coffee is brewed at the optimum temperature.
I have seen no evidence presented whatsoever that the other fast food places served their coffee cooler for safety reasons. Did I miss that?
Oh, and by the way, McDonalds also found three different fast-food outlets that were selling coffee hotter than McDonalds was.
Thanks for that quote. Now I see where the 2 to 7 seconds figure is coming from. That really contradicts the source I posted that said 12 to 15 seconds. So I guess we are at an impasse on that particular point.
As has been pointed out - surely more than 70 people out of a billion per year have spilled McDonald’s coffee on their skin. If it was really this boiling cauldron of danger that it is made out to be, why did so few people get burned? And out of those, why were only SOME of them 3rd degree burns?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was my reading of all the legal mumbo-jumbo that’s been posted here, that “preventability” is not the only test, that the danger must be weighed against the utility of having good-tasting coffee. McDonald’s argued that the utility of good coffee was in fact very high (being the leading seller of coffee), and that the danger was very low (1 in 24 million chance). You may disagree with their defense (obviously the jury did), but you cannot say that the improbablity is irrelevant.
In addition, they argued that a decrease in temp to 160 would NOT prevent injury, which destroys the preventability point altogether.
Oh, sorry - one more thing:
I just wanted to point out that while SOME posters may have said that the case was ludicrous, that’s not the position of everyone who is arguing pro-McDonald’s. I thought we had gotten WAY beyond the “It’s coffee - it’s supposed to be hot you stupid bitch” kind of characterization. My original point was not that the case was ridiculous, but that the pendulum had swung too far the other way, with the Trial Lawyer’s Association characterizing it as an open-and-shut case of negligence, and conveniently leaving out a lot of details in support of McDonald’s position.
Beagle, thanks for re-stating your position on this case so clearly.
Sam, I really appreciate the way you’ve set up the debate and it’s polarizing tendencies. That is very helpful IMO. I think you’re exactly right about how you set up the opposing contexts–with the crux of the matter being the definition of the industry standard, and the information on which that’s based.
blowero: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was my reading of all the legal mumbo-jumbo that’s been posted here…”
I know there are some substantive points in your post but I think it’s a bit unfair of you, at this point, to deride other posters’ comments as “legal mumbo-jumbo.” I’ve lost count of the actual number of lawyers/law students who’ve taken part in this thread. I do know though that when people like Jodi, Sua, Beagle, minty and, recently, James Madison take the time to explain concepts that laypersons don’t normally know, and to explain what they’ve learned in law schools or in cases of their own, I feel grateful to them. That’s actually why I like reading the SDMB–because I learn stuff. If I just want to have knock-down slugfest on purely ideological grounds, I can post in the Pit, or better still argue with my dad ;).
Let me ask you, if this debate were about the function of message boards, and a handfull of programmers clarified the debate by explaining technical matters regarding the writing of code, would you feel comfortable denigrating their posts as “techie mumbo-jumbo”?
As to your last point, I may have missed it or forgotten but I don’t recall what the arguments for the pendulum swinging too far have been. In what sense does the Trial Lawyer’s Association insist on “open-and-shut”? The pro-plaintiff links I’ve seen were rhetorically moderate, explaining that the case wasn’t ludicrous or as factually simple as detractors had made out. What does the TLA say?