Liebeck sued McDonald's for actual costs of her medical treatment. McDonald's refused to pay for her injuries or admit fault. The jury awarded the massive punitive damages ($160,000 in actual damages and $2.7M in punitive) of their own volition, because the company's behavior was so egregious, was just one incident in an ongoing chain of similar ones (and for which they'd settled previous claims), and was obviously responsible for the third degree burns she suffered beneath her clothing.
Please check your facts next time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
I never stated an opinion either way on whether this was a bad lawsuit. My statement was that it was a lawsuit launched without the cooperation of the company. Which is definitely true in that case.
That said I did need to check my facts because I called it a class action lawsuit when it wasn't. But that issue is completely unrelated to anything that you said.
My apologies for my ambiguity. I could have been far clearer about what I was trying to say, and my motivations for having said it.
I see both parts of the discussion are among the older members of HN, glad to see they're setting a good example :)
I wouldn't call this a mistake. It is a very accurate heuristic not just in this particular case but in online discussions in general. There will be errors, but deploying a heuristic instead of a perfect algorithm makes great sense when dealing with the internet. Less acceptable for something like a scientific paper.
I'd say actually reading may be a better approach rather than to use an heuristic.
Perhaps you should read what I wrote then, because what I wrote was about a heuristic to identify intentions based on what was read. Would you suggest that in face to face discussions body language should ignored when it disagrees with what a person says?
First off, the lawsuit was justified, but not because of the temperature of the coffee. The coffee was being served at industry standard temperatures (defined in terms of what _other_ companies in the industry serve their coffee at), despite what many claim. The primary problem is that their coffee cup design was defective, and was prone to collapsing.
In response to the lawsuit, McDonald's has not changed the temperature of their coffee. If you order a black coffee at a McDonald's today (or at many other shops), it may very well be just as hot as the coffee that disfigured Liebeck in 1994. So for the love of god, don't spill coffee on yourself! Coffee as cool as 140F can cause third degree burns in mere seconds. That is well below what anybody serves coffee at. Coffee is dangerous. It's just that simple.
http://www.burnfoundation.org/programs/resource.cfm?c=1&a=3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaur...
Where did this meme of "Liebeck v. McDonald's was actually 100% reasonable, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool" come from?
In the immediate aftermath of the lawsuit, many Americans became extremely critical of any personal injury lawsuits. It appeared as though if it continued, the livelihoods of personal injury lawyers might be threatened. So an informal propaganda campaign was launched, featuring some selective truth (the burn photographs) and some lies (the idea that the coffee served to her was way hotter than coffee you and I are used to). These sort of lawyers are extremely good at being convincing, that is pretty much their job after all, and in a non-adversarial context it is not suprising that they are able to convince most people.
Exactly. The other effect is to move the Overton window. Prior to the propaganda campaign, those of us who would have said Liebeck wasn't even entitled to compensation for her actual medical costs would have been branded as unsympathetic and a bit cold-hearted. Now, we'd be considered baby-eating monsters with opinions too radical to be a part of public discourse.
These sort of lawyers are extremely good at being convincing, that is pretty much their job after all, and in a non-adversarial context it is not suprising that they are able to convince most people.
It's like the old adage, "Don't make enemies with people who buy ink by the barrel," taken to the next level. Lawyers ru(i)n almost everything in America.
You can be sued for the same act by multiple people, though you can't be sued BY THE SAME PARTY for that same act multiple times under a doctrine called res judicata.
You can usually opt out of a class action, and then sue again on your own - and you're entitled to your day in court to assert the claim against them. Though, since most people don't opt out, a class action does provide a way to settle the case with the vast majority of potential claimants.
If the defendant LOST the earlier case, they may even be precluded from re-litigating any issues resolved in it (and, by extension, prevented from defending themselves substantively). Though in some situations, like if it were easy for the claimant to join the earlier lawsuit, this may not be so. See Parklane Hosiery Co. v. Shore, 439 U.S. 322 (1979).
Double jeopardy doesn't prevent someone from opting out of a class action lawsuit and suing separately.
>hot coffee lawsuit
The hot coffee case wasn't a class action lawsuit.
Yes. But one individual probably does not have sufficient injury to represent a meaningful case for the company. The point is that you've blocked a second, larger, class action lawsuit. Which is what the company is actually scared of.
The hot coffee case wasn't a class action lawsuit.
You're right. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Interchange_Fee_an... for a more meaningful class action lawsuit.
The "hot coffee" lawsuit was well justified, as the burns were serious and McDonalds did not learn from previous instances.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer etc. please ask your lawyer for legal advice.
I would love to see more information about the terms for the second lawsuit. Certainly you hear about cases with large settlements. But you don't hear about the routine cases. I don't know the mix.
That said, I do know that there are class action lawsuits which never really fix anything, no matter how many times they happen. As an example, consider printer ink. Every manufacturer has received class action lawsuits for their printers claiming to be out of ink when they are not. They have all settled them with coupons that are redeemable for amounts that are pretty meaningless. (About enough to cover one extra refill of ink.)
Did behavior change? I currently have a printer that was purchased last year, sees only light use (every month or two we'll print a few pages), and which has claimed to have run out of ink twice. It is on my mind because the second time last week. I know that there is no way it actually used up the magenta ink. But it is currently unusable.
And it works! No matter how bad my experience is, I'm not motivated to buy another printer because I have no reason to believe that any other consumer printer will be honest with me. And even with the printer lying to me, I simply don't do enough printing for it to be cost effective to buy an expensive printer that I would trust.
Even the main justice who created them "could not conceive of a modern function or a coherent theory for representative litigation."
Even then, rule 48 was opt-in until 1966, when a federal court rule change (IE not a law, just the court rules made up by a few federal judges) changed to make them opt-out.
This is what sprung up the industry you see today.
The rest of what you describe is simply a symptom of not building a coherent platform for mass-action, but instead a way to simplify lawsuits that involved 40 or so people.
It only applies to the extent that individuals at Lenovo receive criminal charges. Then they are only on trial once.
But if they harmed 10 people the same way, then all ten people can absolutely sue to cover the damages they sustained.
But to an extent you are right: if you've already been compensated (in the form a $5 class action coupon) for the $??? privacy harm of a rooted computer? Then too bad - you should have opted out before your class settled.
If you do the same thing multiple times, you can be sued for each instance.
If you run a scam that affects a million people, you can face a million separate lawsuits.
Hmm. I wonder if the law firm bringing the case, specified in the docket as PRITZKER LEVINE LLP, has any history of doing this.
The US has a protection against double jeopardy. If you've been sued once for something, you cannot be sued again (and again, and again) for the same thing. In most cases this is a good thing. It means that once the case is done, it is really done.
But companies have learned how to take advantage of it. If they think they are going to have to fight a class action lawsuit that they are likely to lose, THE COMPANY will go to some lawyers, and say, "If you bring this lawsuit against us, we will cooperate fully, cave in quickly, and we'll settle on modest terms."
Said lawyers have every incentive to cooperate. It is easy money, and the more reliable they are about following through, the more of this kind of work they can get.
And companies have every incentive to do this. Because occasionally class action lawsuits happen that the company did not set up like this. That's when you get huge claims like the ones that took down big tobacco, or the hot coffee lawsuit that McDonalds faced a few years back.