Do yourself a favour and actually read about that incident.
If you tweak elements of the case then you can imagine the restaurant winning. As it stands, it's not surprising McDonald's lost.
The dangers of... hot coffee? Yeah, everyone knows that. That's exactly why they shouldn't have lost to the extent that they did.
It's tragic for the person involved obviously; I get why emotionally the court would feel sympathy for the victim. But objectively speaking its pretty ridiculous for the legal system to be awarding punitive damages for companies exposing people to normal, reasonable risks that everyone encounters as part of everyday life. It creates a culture where businesses have to treat grown adults like children for fear of huge fines if something goes wrong.
At worst McDonald's was probably like 10% responsible for the incident but they got treated like they were 100,000% responsible.
(The jury actually did find the woman was partially responsible, it was the judge that decided on the absurd damages amount. It later got reduced and settled out of court so all in all I think the system ultimately worked okay despite the judge's ridiculous initial decision.)
Edit: I misread, it was actually the jury that made the initial ridiculous punitive damages ruling, the judge was the one who reduced it later before it got settled out of court for an undisclosed (possibly still ridiculously high) amount.
80%, according to the jury.
> The jury actually did find the woman was partially responsible
Correct, which was factored into the award of actual damages, reducing the $200,000 in damages to a $160,000 award, since it was in a comparative negligence jurisdiction.
> it was the judge that decided on the absurd damages amount. It later got reduced and settled out of court
No, it was the jury that returned the original $2.7 million punitive damage award, which the judge reduced to $480,000, for a total actual+punitive award of $640k in the trial judgement.
The parties did settle out of court while an appeal of the trial judgement was pending.
No, a jury verdict that is not reflected in the trial judgement is not a ruling at all.
There was some rush-to-publish reporting of the jury verdict prior to the ruling which is the source of the whole popular perception of the case, because the misunderstanding of the case has deliberately magnified ao it can be weaponized by people wanting to limit perfectly warranted recovery from actually-at-fault corporatiojs by spinning false tales of out-of-control judgements.
Given subsequent McDonald's incidents of the same type, it was clearly inadequate to serve the function of punitive damages, that is, to be sufficient to dissuade the willful tortfeasor from repeating the same willful tort. (It’s quite likely that the original $2.7 million award would also have been.)
> handling too-hot-to-immediately-drink beverages is a normal, reasonable risk that almost everyone encounters as part of everyday life.
That's not an argument that the punitive damage award was ridiculous, that's an argument that the jury assessment of comparative negligence that figured into the actual damage award was wrong. Punitive damages are not even in theory about the degree of care that the injured party should have applied, that's the comparative negligence part of actual damages.
I'm open to the idea of awarding damages for harms caused by inherently risky activities as a way of incentivizing companies to take extra steps beyond what is legally or morally necessary to mitigate those risks, but in such cases the damages should be compensatory, not punitive, and use a comparative negligence-like standard based on the degree to which the risks could have been realistically mitigated and the degree to which the plaintiffs are themselves personally responsible.
"Willfully causing injury in this way should not be a wrong at all" is a very different argument than "the damage award was inappropriate for willfully causing injury in this way", so it would help if you would not disguise your argument for the former positions as one for the latter position if you want to have a productive exchange.
My argument is that both of those things are true. Willfully serving hot coffee is not wrong at all, and a punitive damage award is highly inappropriate for unwillfully contributing to the harm caused by woman spilling it on herself.
I don't expect hot coffee to put me in the hospital needing skin grafts.
Note that both customers and store managers had complained many times.
I don't know what to tell you. If you disagree take it up with scientists? I guess?
Maybe this time they won't go on a PR campaign against the victim (it's also the UK where you only get real damages, so they probably won't care enough, no million pound lawsuits here even if it was as serious as the original case, which it isn't).
There's definitely a balance between hot drink being hot and absolutely scalding, especially when you know you're going to be handing it into a vehicle from a window. And it's not an especially onerous thing to turn the temperature down, and as you say, no one likes getting 98 degree paper cup of lava that you can't even sip for 10 minutes. They say they did control the temperature, so maybe it's indeed all on the customers, but I do know I have been given some really hot hot drinks in paper cups that seem excessive.
It's a textbook perfect example of how punitive damages are supposed to work.