Liebeck v. McDonald's, Retried

You have been assigned the case file as the public knows it.

In February 1992, a woman bought a cup of coffee at a McDonald's drive-through in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Riding in the car with her drink, she took the lid off the cup and spilled the coffee into her lap.

She was burned, and she sued McDonald's. Her claim: the coffee was too hot.

A New Mexico jury heard the case in 1994 and awarded her nearly $2.9 million. The verdict made headlines around the world and became the most famous example in the American argument over lawsuits: to some, proof that anyone can sue over anything; to others, a case everyone talks about and no one has actually read.

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

The plaintiff's case is simple: a product served to a customer caused her serious injury, and the seller answers for the products it serves. Coffee is meant to be consumed, not to inflict burns requiring medical care. When a routine spill of a routine breakfast drink puts a customer in the hospital, something about that drink was not routine. A business that hands a customer a product that dangerous, in a moving car, through a window, has a duty to make it safe or to say plainly that it is not. The jury that heard the full evidence found the company responsible. Before you dismiss their verdict from the headline alone, ask what they knew that the headline never told you.

Coffee is hot. Every adult knows it, every adult accepts it, and every adult who has ever carried a cup in a car has managed that obvious risk. The plaintiff bought a hot drink, chose to open it in her lap, and spilled it on herself. No one at McDonald's touched the cup after it left the window. If a customer's own slip converts a cup of coffee into millions of dollars, then no business that serves anything warm is safe from its own menu. Personal responsibility has to mean something, and it means the most in exactly the case where sympathy pulls hardest. An accident, even a painful one, is not automatically someone else's fault.