Liebeck v. McDonald's, Retried

You have been assigned the trial record.

Stella Liebeck was 79 years old in February 1992 when she bought a 49-cent cup of coffee at a McDonald's drive-through in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was a passenger in her grandson's car. He pulled out of the drive-through lane and parked so she could add cream and sugar. Holding the cup between her knees, she pulled the far side of the lid toward her, and the cup tipped into her lap.

Her sweatpants absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin. She suffered third-degree burns, the kind that destroy the full thickness of the skin, across six percent of her body, with lesser burns over sixteen percent. She spent eight days in the hospital, underwent skin grafting to her thighs and groin, lost twenty pounds during recovery, and required care for two years.

Evidence at trial established that McDonald's corporate policy required coffee to be held at 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit. Coffee served at home is typically 135 to 140 degrees. At 190 degrees, liquid can cause third-degree burns in under three seconds; at 160 degrees, a person has more than twenty seconds to react. McDonald's own quality-assurance manager testified the company knew the coffee was not fit for consumption at the temperature served, because it would scald the mouth and throat.

Documents produced in discovery showed more than 700 prior reports of burns from McDonald's coffee between 1982 and 1992, including third-degree burns to children, and settlements the company had paid in earlier claims. McDonald's had made no change to its holding temperature.

Ms. Liebeck initially did not want to sue. She wrote to McDonald's asking it to check its temperature practices and to cover her costs, roughly $20,000 in medical bills and lost income. McDonald's offered $800. A mediator later recommended settling for $225,000; McDonald's declined.

At trial, McDonald's argued that customers buy its coffee hot precisely because they want it hot, that Ms. Liebeck's own handling caused the spill, and that her age made her skin more vulnerable than the average customer's.

The question before you is the question that was before that jury: was McDonald's liable for her injuries?

This case was never about a spill. It is about a company that decided, as written policy, to serve a product 40 to 50 degrees hotter than anyone serves it at home, hot enough to destroy skin in seconds, through a car window, to customers it knew would be holding it in their laps.

McDonald's cannot claim surprise. Seven hundred burn reports crossed its desk in the decade before Ms. Liebeck's injury. It paid settlements. Its own quality manager admitted under oath that the coffee, as served, was not fit to drink. And it changed nothing, because the cost of the burns was smaller than the profit of the policy. That is the calculation punitive damages exist to answer.

The defense will say coffee is hot. Everyone agrees. But there is hot, and there is a liquid three seconds away from a skin graft. A 79-year-old woman asked this company for her medical bills, and it offered $800. The jury that saw her burns and read those documents did not lose its mind. It saw a corporation that had done the arithmetic of indifference, and it answered in the only language the arithmetic understands.

Sympathy for Ms. Liebeck's injuries, which the defense does not minimize, is not a substitute for causation. The undisputed facts remain: the car was parked, the cup was in her control, she chose to hold it between her knees, and she pulled the lid toward her own body. However hot the coffee, the spill was hers.

The temperature policy the plaintiff attacks is the industry's own standard. Coffee is brewed and held hot because that is how coffee works and how customers demand it; drive-through customers in particular buy coffee to drink minutes later, at their destination, not at the window. Millions of cups were served without incident for every reported burn, and 700 complaints over a decade of billions of servings is not a pattern of indifference; it is a rounding error of ordinary life.

The law asks whether McDonald's breached a duty, not whether a jury can be moved by photographs. Adults assume the ordinary risks of ordinary products, and no warning label has ever made coffee cold. If this verdict stands, every merchant who serves a product exactly as customers ask for it becomes the insurer of every accident that follows. That is not accountability. It is liability without limit.