HBO ran a documentary on it and tort reform in general a few years ago; it wasn't just that she had been badly burned, but that there was a string of McDonald's coffee burn cases with smaller rewards and the jury felt that the company needed to be punished for negligence at that point. The award was many, many times larger than what Liebeck asked for.

The punitive damages were also roughly the amount of money McDonald's makes selling coffee in one or two days, according to a contemporaneous WSJ report: http://www.business.txstate.edu/users/ds26/Business%20Law%20...

It's a terrible example for many reasons. One that is more often misapplied than not.

Even if the coffee had kill her is still stupid; lets put it this way: making the coffee inhumanly hot is just as smart as cleaning the cups with cyanide, but we don't have a law that forbids cup cleaning with cyanide (or a silly message in every cup about it)

Coffee and tea are usually made with boiling or close-to-boiling water. Water in an open container at sea level simply can't get much hotter than 'boiling'. The argument that the coffee was 'too hot' seems specious. Instead, the design of the cup is the more important issue - the company was serving hot coffee in a cup that was prone to failure.

I don't understand your comment. We don't clean cups with cyanide. What point are you trying to make?

Nor do we have a law against hot coffee. But if you do something negligent or with foreseeable harm then you may be liable, as McDonald's was, in a tort.

It's just as stupid for people who believe in personal liberty and responsibility and it didn't make companies serve coffee any colder.They just put 'Hot Coffee' on the lids now, what a huge win.