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Comment by prettyStandard | Hacker News Reader

I can second these episodes, and the podcast series in general. It's very informative about things that have been "misremembered". Other good series were the OJ Simpson trial, Monica Lewinsky, the Satanic Panic, and of course the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit.

Just recently on Hacker News I saw someone making jokes about this lawsuit being spurious.

Oh gosh, now I'm on a tangent.

Rather than defend "this was not spurious" I'll just say that's how our legal system is set up. The legislative branch is not interested in making reasonable laws, and/or creating capable regulating bodies like most other modern countries. Your recourse here is to sue, hopefully there is an appropriate decision, and it's taken as precedent. Of course we've gone further in that direction in recent history.

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I don't know if it is fair to say people "misremembered" the details of the McDonald's coffee lawsuit. As the news media and pop culture weirdly seemed to go out of their way to paint McDonald's as the victim and the woman as negligent, people never knew the correct details at the time to begin with.

I was a college student at the time and never saw it that way.

I remember in the media there were vigorous debates over this as being "frivolous" but I remember all my friends were on the victims side. Spending days in the hospital to get skin grafting because their coffee was too hot I think far exceeded what someone would classify as "frivolous". I also remember several news reports about how they found out through court documents McDonald's had over 700 reports of burns between 1982-1992 which to me was completely shocking and proved they knew their coffee was way too hot.

Now you see all the warnings on the labels, most of the bigger chains have cardboard sleeves so your hands don't get too hot holding it. McDonald's has since reduced the temperature of their coffee as well.

The only thing I didn't accurately remember was several people told me that the lady initially won her lawsuit, but lost on appeal and McDonald's didn't have to pay her anything. In actuality, she won a sizeable award from the jury, but it was greatly reduced by the judge and then before an appeal, McDonald's finally settled out of court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

The media also follow trends. I remember all through the '90s there was a trend of reporting frivolous cases as news, probably for sensationalist purposes. The ones I remembered were "prisoner sues because his ice cream melted", burglar sues after falling out of rafters". These type of stories were popular on morning radio programs.

What I want to know is if Ms Liebeck just got lumped into that fad, or if there was economic pressure from McD's to weaken her case. McDonald's advertising spend was HUGE back then, of course on the same media channels that reported about her.

I loved the first 20-30 episodes, but at a certain point I got the feeling they had a very significant axe to grind on their supposedly impartial revisiting of some of the events they were looking at.

When they started talking about health outcomes, especially, their tone of "we know what's obviously true, our outgroup is stupid" got too strong for me and I stopped listening.

I'd be interested to know if they've toned that down, at all.

I had some hesitation about recommending them because of this, but going from memory I think it was a good couple of episodes

> he legislative branch is not interested in making reasonable laws, and/or creating capable regulating bodies like most other modern countries

That’s the point of a common-law system. Not that I’m defending Congress and how little they get done—I’m not, they’re terrible right now—but we don’t have case law because Congress is terrible. We have case law because that’s how our legal system is meant to work. The legislation lays out the theory, and the details get worked out by judges after theory meets practice. It’s not somehow inferior to civil law, just different.

Common law doesn’t require lawsuits to cover issues like this.

It’s hard to sue a company when they follow quantitative guidelines. However terms like ‘due caution’ punt issues to the courts who then come up with a meaningful standard.

Unfortunately 'creating capable regulating bodies' is no longer possible, in the binding opinion of the Supreme Court.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supreme-court...

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