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

&quot;Tort reform&quot; 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&#x2F;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 professional behavior.<p>A sad example is provided by Texas. Protection against bad doctors was provided in Texas by three things: the Texas Medical Board, malpractice suits, and hospital managers. The legislature greatly limited the amount patients can win in malpractice suits, and they made it so hospitals cannot be held liable for hiring incompetent doctors unless the plaintiff can prove the hospital knew the doctor was an extreme risk and ignored this--and they made it so the plaintiff usually cannot get access to the documents that would be needed to prove this.<p>This shifted most of the burden of protecting Texans from bad doctors to the Texas Medical Board, which was not designed for that. It was more designed for licensing and ensuring that doctors keep with standards, not for investigating bad doctors. The Medical Board was not given any more resources to deal with this new and heavy workload, and so bad doctors could practice much longer than they would have been able to before the legislature decided to do their tort reform.<p>This article on the Dr. Christopher Duntsch case shows who wrong this can go: <a href="http://www.texasobserver.org/anatomy-tragedy/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.texasobserver.org&#x2F;anatomy-tragedy&#x2F;</a>

My wife is a defense attorney that works claims litigation, e.g insurance defense for carriers. Watching &quot;Hot Coffee&quot; was very difficult for her. Part of her job during the pre-trial phase of any case is to push as much potential liability on a claimant as possible and push for mediation; trial should be avoided at all cost. |If a case goes to trial it is her job to make the claimant liable (enough) so that the damages are split better.<p>For &#x27;frivolous cases&#x27; to actually hit trial months of depositions, research, and meditations have to fail. If a case actually goes to trial it&#x27;s because one side feels so confident in their case that mediation is not an option.<p>As a side note, in insurance cases in Texas, the jury is not allowed to know that any insurance money has been paid. So in a situation where someone is hurt in an accident by another driver then sues for medical expenses, the jury is not told that the medical expenses (are often) already paid for by the carriers. They&#x27;re also not told that, no matter how much money they award, if it falls under the civil caps on awards (in Texas) that the judge will automatically lower their award after they leave the court room.

I&#x27;ve always (and I mean always; I&#x27;ve long been aware about the real story) thought the comments about the coffee lawsuit were extremely cruel. &#x27;Oh, hot coffee fell on her lap and burned her, and she sued for millions in damages!&#x27; - hot coffee at an unreasonably high temperature fell on her lap and gave her <i>third-degree burns</i>. To suggest she was suing over something trivial is horribly disrespectful to a woman who suffered that.

Hot Coffee is an important documentary for all Americans, but parts of it are especially relevant to those of us who work in tech. The movie shows how arbitration clauses, enforced by many telecomm and software companies, threaten our constitutional rights to bring civil charges against the firms. As one expert in the film puts it, we&#x27;d be better off to adopt the term tort <i>deform</i>.

I would say police abuse does appear to be a serious problem and lawsuits are probably the main thing that keep it in check. The departments themselves don&#x27;t seem to deal with offending officers properly very often. It always pains me to see settlements and the offending officers returning to duty with little repercussion.<p>Interesting article.

I generally agree with the article, but it gets one thing wrong. It says:<p><pre><code> the evidence does not show an epidemic of frivolous lawsuits winning jackpots </code></pre> My counterexample is patent trolls availing themselves of the hospitality of the &quot;United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas&quot;.

See also, this Harvard study on medical malpractice. <a href="http://archive.sph.harvard.edu/press-releases/2006-releases/press05102006.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.sph.harvard.edu&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2006-releases&#x2F;...</a>

The only part of the bill of rights that hasn&#x27;t been under relentless attack in the last few decades has been the 3rd Amendment. I&#x27;m sure if we give it time that&#x27;ll happen soon enough too.

If you are interested and have time watch the &quot;Hot Coffee&quot; documentary.<p>It explores this very case and issues related to it.<p><a href="http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Hot-Coffee/70167106?trkid=222336" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvd.netflix.com&#x2F;Movie&#x2F;Hot-Coffee&#x2F;70167106?trkid=22233...</a><p>It was interesting to me because I had heard about it, or rather was told about it this lawsuit and what I was told and believed about that case was wrong for the longest time. This film explores how that PR effort started and how successful it was.

I am surprised to learn that arbitration clauses are legal in contracts with consumers. Arbitration is legal in Denmark, but only between businesses or - in few cases - private citizens who agree to them, but they can never be part of a contract with a consumer. Netflix tried that when they moved into Denmark, thus null and voiding the entire contract between Netflix and their consumers.

I think the article makes a good case for retaining tort law, but when it comes to people&#x27;s health and safety, a public health system, combined with government lead scheme to enforce product safety through the criminal courts would be a better answer to some of the problems.<p>If the government proactively monitored product safety and responded to complaints, it would be able to shut down dangerous practices (and doctors consistently making bad decisions) before problems happen, and also engage in education so that businesses that aren&#x27;t aware that their products could be dangerous can fix the problems.<p>If a someone is injured, it is reasonable for the government to pay for this to support the public, because otherwise getting the financial support the unlucky injured person needs depends on being able to afford a lengthy legal battle, and also on the business being unable to pay. In addition, some decisions are a trade-off (especially for doctors); for example, getting an X-ray might increase your chances of cancer, but might also detect a very rare disease; a doctor might reasonably decide, in the patient&#x27;s best interest, that given the symptoms, the increased risk of cancer is not worth the miniscule risk of not detecting the disease. If the patient is then severely injured by the disease, should the doctor have to pay out? If the patient gets support from the government either way, then the question doesn&#x27;t need to be answered. It is likely that malpractice suits encourage doctors to minimise the risk that the patient can prove a tort, rather than to act in the best interests of the patient - it is very hard to prove that a particular X-ray contributed to cancer later in life.<p>This is also fairer to businesses, because when a certain decision is unsafe relative to other practices but has a low probability of resulting in a lawsuit, most small or medium sized business engaging in the risky practice may never actually have the bad outcome happen, purely due to luck. If the government prosecutes unsafe practices, rather than the civil courts award punitive damages when unsafe practices lead to a bad outcome, businesses are discouraged or prevented from &#x27;playing the lottery&#x27;, and the desired public policy outcome of fewer unsafe practices is more directly achieved. Likewise, businesses that play it safe by industry standards but, through bad luck, have a bad outcome are not over-punished for being unlucky (this applies especially to doctors making necessary trade-offs).

As a side note, the cost of the lawsuits (relative to the benefits) is one of the reasons why I don&#x27;t think anti discrimination laws are a good idea. I am thinking of ditching them, but allowing the EEOC or similar to order particular sets of companies to stop discrimination for a period of time if necessary.

For some reason, (perhaps the use of Title Case) I thought this would be about the GTA mod (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hot_Coffee_mod</a>). Well, never mind, this was interesting as well.

&gt; The judge reduced the punitive damages to $480,000, for a total of $640,000. McDonalds appealed and later settled out of court for an undisclosed amount believed to be between $400,000 and $600,000.<p>Why would she settle for the SAME amount?! Makes no sense.

If damages are limited when you do something wrong and get caught, that increases the incentive to misbehave.

USA has 281 lawyers per 100,000, britain 94, japan 7.<p>Lawyers will become as powerful in society as you let them become.

Why are punitive damages paid to the plaintiff rather than the government&#x27;s general fund?

What a strange article to feature on Hacker News, front page two days running. Written by a kid just out of college, with little or no life experience, no legal expertise, and quoting biased sources like a liability lawyer to make his rather whimsical case about &quot;eroding the 7th Amendment&quot;.<p>It sparked a tiresomely predictable debate about hot coffee, as happens every time this case comes up; there are always a couple thousand reader comments ranging from &quot;She was stupid&quot; to &quot;McD&#x27;s coffee is too hot, she deserved more money&quot;. I&#x27;ve read a lot of them and it does get repetitive.<p>As I see it, the Liebeck incident was unfortunate and tragic but does not represent a trend. This hapless woman appears to have been manipulated by an angry family into hiring a lawyer and blowing this up into a big case that took on a life of its own and caused her to be reviled by advocates of tort reform as a classic example of the legal system run amok. Others hailed her as a hero for the little people sticking it to the big bad corporation.<p>Yet, considering that McDonald&#x27;s sells 10 million or so cups of coffee a day, 70 reports of coffee scalding a year seems like edge cases. Could it not be simply that there are 70 careless people a year? Much easier to believe than that somehow the coffee is leaping out of its cup and scalding innocent customers about 6 times a month, and they each should get $2.4 million from Mickey D&#x27;s which after all is a giant corporation so &quot;they can afford it&quot;.<p>Now every damn cup of coffee I buy comes with a little warning &quot;Caution! The drink you are about to enjoy is very hot!&quot; Well, hell yes it better be hot. I asked for hot coffee, and the hotter the better.<p>Once, in a coffee shop in Harvard Square, Cambridge Mass., a stupid young waitress managed to dump a decanter of very hot coffee onto my lap off the tray she was carrying. I got burned on the thigh very close to my genitals, it hurt, it blistered. I got over it. They didn&#x27;t charge me for the coffee. Life went on. That&#x27;s a case where it truly was &quot;their fault&quot;. But I didn&#x27;t sue them or anything.<p>I think in my case they could have apologized a bit more profusely, but then again, they don&#x27;t apologize anymore because they figure that&#x27;s an admission of guilt that you&#x27;ll use against them in court. That&#x27;s why Pennsylvania recently passed an apology law for doctors. Yes, they have a law now saying it&#x27;s OK for docs to apologize without fear of lawsuit. The tort lawyers opposed the law. What a twisted world we live in!

How can arbitration be legally exist... never agree to arbitration.

&gt; she relates all the checks that exist to prevent greedy people from suing for unreasonable amounts of money ...<p>Note the part of the sentence, &quot;unreasonable amounts of money&quot;. That doesn&#x27;t mean the lawsuits still don&#x27;t happen, costing business owners thousands of dollars just to get them thrown out. Sometimes it&#x27;s cheaper to throw the complainant a few thousand dollars, which they&#x27;ll claim as a win, just to go away cause it&#x27;s cheaper than going to court.<p>I was going to show two examples from my own restaurants but decided against it. You would not believe these were even considered by any attorney much less the judge who was willing to listen to them.

I heard of that, but I actually never thought this story is true. What about the drying the cat in the microwave lawsuit?? I&#x27;m scared america!

I highly recommend watching a documentary called Hot Coffee (<a href="http://www.hotcoffeethemovie.com/Default.asp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hotcoffeethemovie.com&#x2F;Default.asp</a>). It goes into details about how corporate lobbying eroded consumer rights.

I regard that as a frivolous lawsuit. As unfortunate as the outcome was, simply put it was her own damn fault. If McDonalds provided her with the coffee with no defects (to the cup for instance) then there was no negligence on their part. Obviously if you spill a hot drink on yourself your going to burn yourself. What is the difference between that and selling someone a hammer and then they crush their hand with it? Admittedly from my perspective here in Ireland I may view this differently from yanks. We drink a lot of tea and good tea must be boiling when you add the teabag, also drive-throughs are a lot less common so you will typically not have your beverage in a moving vehicle.