> Detail often missed: she had a lid on the styrofoam cup, properly placed. It wasn't an open cup. The cup and lid were of low quality and, while they passed at lower temperatures, deformed at the serving temperature, enough that the lid popped off, causing the spill.

According to the Wikipedia article[1] the lid didn't pop off accidentally: she tried to remove it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaura...

How else would she add the sugar that was provided separately from the already closed cup? This was "by design".

Using a cup holder or going inside so that it wouldn't be a completely full uncapped cup squeezed between her legs?

Yup, establishments shouldn't even serve liquids in inadequate containers. Either the customer should provide their own travel mug (such as a zojirushi or thermos nissan mug) or they should provide much safer disposable mugs. The crap cups that McDonalds offers are simply not up to the task.

If necessary, they can do the same thing as SF does with the bag fee:

-- coffee in your own mug costs like 69 to 99 cents. -- coffee in a disposable mug that is adequately safe costs 99 cents plus the cost of the safe mug.

TBH, even for situations where safety isn't a concern, I'd love to see the bag fee concept extended to pretty much everywhere where disposable containers are used.

As much as I'd like to see less general waste, it's important to keep in mind that any large disposable hot coffee cup is a flimsy piece junk with the lid removed, millions are sold per day, those lids even sometimes pop off, and yet we're talking about a 22 year old case for its remarkability.

Is it remarkable because of how rare it is for admittedly insufficient disposable coffee cups to negligently discharge their contents all over their users, or because of how rare it is that such discharge results in life-threatening injuries and years of reconstructive treatment to try to repair destroyed genitals?

Yes, people take care with dangerous/messy things. Is any possible source of danger to be considered a problem to be eliminated? If that's what you're after, please go join an appropriate lifestyle community, as your desire is an abstracted fantasy incongruent with reality.

The case isn't remarkable because she got third-degree burns all over her legs and genitals, it's remarkable because McDonalds didn't settle out of court like in the hundreds of other similar lawsuits against them around the same time period. (And this was after they'd received a number of warnings that their coffee was unsafe too.)