If this coffee is < 200F, then I can safely put in lap. Else, I will ask nephew to hold.
Nope. People don't do that. They just do the right thing most of the time, dumb things a small fraction of the time. Some people do more dumb things than they should.
The Liebeck situation is an edge case. McDonald's sells tens of millions of cups of coffee a day (depending on the source, 10 million/day or 300 million/month or 500 million a month). If there are several burn cases a year, or even several hundred, that probably does not constitute a significant trend.
There are thousands of people who burn themselves, electrocute themselves, crash their cars, choke on a bone, and do other things that are unfortunate but avoidable with a little common sense.
You can't protect everybody from every contingency, nor would you want to; we would become a nation of prisoners in soft rubber cells, protected from every possible danger. I read a sci-fi story about that once and it was rather unpleasant!
Fresh black coffee from just about any shop will cause 3rd-degree burns if you spill it in your lap. Mcdonalds coffee was not somehow unique in that respect, despite opinion to the contrary.
In this thread, meaning to condemn Mcdonalds by holding the "reasonable Starbucks" up as an example, Starbucks coffee has been pegged at "145-165F".
145F coffee can cause 3rd degree burns in less than five seconds. 165F coffee can cause 3rd degree burns in less than one second.
Industry standard coffee causes third degree burns.
When I was a kid, I got a pretty decent electric shock from a neighbor's improperly mounted doorbell. The doorbell did not work, so I flipped it over (it was dangling on some wires) and tried to fix it on the spot (as if I knew what I was doing...) and got shocked.
From that moment on, I knew not to touch exposed wires. I knew that it was my own damn fault for touching the wires and getting shocked. My parents got really angry at my neighbors for having exposed wires like that, but I was scolded too for doing something I had no business doing.
The point is if the coffee lady had any common sense she would not have put coffee between her legs (I feel bad for her injuries as any person would, but I still fail to see McDonalds' responsibility here). The worst thing to happen to our judicial system isn't the hot coffee case - it's shifting the onus of personal responsibility to the service or product providers.
edit: I'm speaking strictly about the hot coffee case and ones similar to it. The article goes on about medical cases which are obviously much more complex