IANAL
There is a law on the books about privacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Stat...
Good luck trying to convince a Judge or a court that you should have privacy when you have stolen something...
Some points, which are mentioned in the very wiki article you linked.
* The coffee was about 45F or 20C higher than McDonald's guidelines.
* The coffee caused third-degree burns that required skin grafting
* Liebeck initially only asked to be compensated $18,000 largely to cover medical expenses; third-degree burns, an eight-day hospital stay which lead her to lose 20 lbs.
Reasonable care would've prevented this injury and that's my problem with the ridiculous payout.
The law has many failings like this. For example, if you become intoxicated, get in a vehicle and manage to kill someone then the law largely says you were not responsible... because you were intoxicated. The punishment for vehicular manslaughter is WAY lower than other unlawful killings, if it's even tried as that. It's so hard to get vehicle-related felonies convicted that often they'll be settled for lower severity crimes (reckless driving and so forth).
But who got intoxicated in the first place? Who didn't take reasonable steps to avoid getting behind the wheel?
The McDonald's case is the poster child for frivolous litigation because, in spite of the misrepresentation or misunderstanding of the facts, ultimately it boils down to rewarding people for being stupid.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe, firstly, this is largely orthogonal to the original discussion, and secondly, my understanding behind why it is considered manslaughter is because of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
No she didn't. She was a passenger and the car was parked.
> The McDonald's case is the poster child for frivolous litigation because,
It's the poster child because if you don't bother to learn any of the facts, it sounds outrageous. And the world is full of people who can't be bothered to learn the facts before they form strong opinions.
I ask because those facts are often presented with the presumption that the person crying frivolousness hasn't considered them before forming his opinion.