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Michael McCann, William Haltom & Anne Bloom, Java Jive: Genealogy of a Juridical
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Java Jive: Genealogy of a Juridical Icon*
MICHAEL MCCANN,** WILLIAM HALTOM,*** AND ANNE BLOOM****
Law … has a symbolic life; it resides in the minds of Americans
…. The influence of legal symbols is indirect but powerful… In its
symbolic form, the law shapes the context in which American politics
is conducted. . .It casts a shadow of popular belief that may be ultimately more significant, albeit more difficult to comprehend, than the
authorities, rules, and penalties that we ordinarily associate with law.’
Stuart A. Scheingold
The accounts or narratives that people tell do more than relate events.
They also make moral claims and to be intelligible must be related
within conventional idioms and vocabularies of motive. . .[M]any
stories are themselves hegemonic, helping to sustain the legitimacy of
the taken-for-granted world … .’
Patricia Ewick & Susan Silbey
“Woman Burned By Hot McDonald’s Coffee Gets $2.9 Million.”3
Associated Press
“When Stella Liebeck fumbled her coffee cup … she might as well
have bought a winning lottery ticket … This absurd judgment is a
stunning illustration of what is wrong with America’s civil justice
system.”
4
San Diego Tribune
Cosmo Kramer remarks about his suit for hot coffee bums: “Oh, I
* The authors would like to thank the National Science Foundation for the generous grant,
#SES-9818581, that supported part of the research reported infra. The authors would also like to
thank Judith Aks and Scott Lemieux for research Helpance and John Brigham, Jeff Dudas, A.
Susan Owen and Elliot Slotnick for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
** Professor, Department of Political Science; Director, Society and Justice; and Director,
Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center; all at the University of Washington.
University of Florida B.A. 1974; University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. 1983.
*** Professor, Politics and Government, University of Puget Sound; University of
Washington B.A. 1975, Ph.D. 1984.
**** Mount Saint Mary’s College B.A. 1983, University of Maryland J.D. 1988, University of
Washington, Ph.D. expected 2002.
1. STUART A. SCHEINGOLD, THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS: LAWYERS, PUBLIC POLICY, &
POLITICAL CHANGE xi (1974).
2. PATRICIA EWICK & SUSAN S. SILBEY, THE COMMON PLACE OF LAW: STORIES FROM
EVERYDAY LIFE 241 (1998) [hereinafter EwICK & SILBEY, THE COMMON PLACE OF LAW].
3. Associated Press, Woman Burned By Hot McDonald’s Coffee Gets $ 2.9 Million, Aug. 18,
1994 [hereinafter AP, Woman Burned].
4. Editorial, Java Hijack, SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE, Aug. 20, 1994, at B6.
UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
can be quite litigious.” 5
Seinfield
In the “Top Ten List – Blizzard Safety Tips” it is suggested: “. 8.
Clear snow off driveway with just one scalding hot cup of McDonald’s coffee.” 6
Mark B. Greenlee
“See, now this just makes me sick. A woman spills coffee on herself
and gets three million dollars. I do that every day and what do I get?
Coffee stains.”7
Goodbye Lover
The last seven epigraphs from varying venues of modem mass
media all refer, in one way or another, to the legal case of Liebeck v.
McDonald’s Restaurants8 (hereinafter the McDonald’s Coffee Case).
Given its extensive and enduring presence in our popular media, the
McDonald’s Coffee Case probably supplies more common knowledge
about the United States civil justice system than any other single lawsuit.9 This article dissects that lawsuit as a heuristic case study to illustrate how a dispute over hot coffee evolved into a cultural icon and
staple of shared knowledge about the inefficiency, inequity, and irrationality of the American legal system. We document the complex ways
in which this story entered into the public mainstream, analyze the social
context and actors that made this seemingly trivial event into a powerful
cultural icon, and suggest some important ways in which this phenomenon matters for legal practice and politics in the contemporary United
States.
THE ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY
The analysis offered here derives from a larger project on the politics of tort reform and the social construction of legal knowledge. Our
5. Seinfeld, The Maestro (NBC television broadcast, Oct. 5, 1995).
6. Mark B. Greenlee, Kramer v. Java World: Images, Issues, And Idols In The Debate Over
Tort Reform, 26 CAP. U. L. REV. 701, 702 n.8 (1997) (referring to a top ten list on The Late Show
with David Letterman (CBS television broadcast, Jan. 8, 1996)) [hereinafter Greenlee, Kramer v.
Java World].
7. GOODBYE LOVER (Warner Bros. 1999).
8. Liebeck v. McDonald’s Rest., P.T.S. Inc., No. CV-93-02419, 1995 WL 360309 (N.M.
Dist. Ct. Aug. 18, 1994).
9. We obviously are making a big, unsubstantiated claim here. But we did try a small and
limited test of the claim. We presented students on the first day of an undergraduate class in
January 2001 with the Associated Press account of the McDonald’s Coffee Case and
confidentially surveyed them to discover how many had previously heard of the case. 110 of the
119 students, or 92.4%, answered affirmatively. They listed on average more than two types of
popular cultural media (TV, newspapers, radio, movies, etc.) as the sources of their information.
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general argument in the study identifies three dimensions of power at
work in the production of knowledge about the civil legal system in
contemporary American society. The first dimension concerns instrumental tactics that advocates employ to support their claims in legislatures, courts, and popular media. The key actors in tort-reform contests
include:
” Tort reformers – corporate-sponsored policy elites, intellectuals, public relations specialists, lobbyists, and their elected
allies who disseminate simplistic, often fictional anecdotes or
“tort tales” to warn the masses and elites about a litigation
explosion by greedy, rights-obsessed plaintiffs and lawyers
ripping off innocent business corporations and undermining
communal norms of civility;’°
” Personal injury lawyers – who regularly represent injured
victims in court and contribute huge amounts of money to
fight tort reform in legislatures and before judges, but who
offer at best feeble efforts to challenge damning anecdotes circulated by the reformers in popular culture.
* Academic social scientists – who employ sociolegal studies
of civil litigation disputing patterns to challenge tort reformers’ simplistic claims in intellectual forums but remain mostly
unknown to the mass public and even its political
representatives.”
Of greatest relevance to this particular paper are the ways in which
tort reformers’ strategically savvy and largely uncontested efforts to saturate American popular culture with images of greedy plaintiffs and a
legal system gone awry have contributed to the general social context in
which the McDonald’s Coffee Case acquired great symbolic significance. We will address this aspect of the story toward the end of our
analysis.
The second dimension of our study, which is more centrally
emphasized in this paper, addresses the institutional practices of the
mass media, especially newspaper reporting of civil litigation activity.
Our approach draws heavily on respected social science analyses regarding how journalists select and represent events for public consumption.
10. For a portrait of tort reformers, see JEAN STEFANIC & RICHARD DELGADO, No MERCY:
How CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS AND FOUNDATIONS CHANGED AMERICA’S SOCIAL AGENDA
(1996). On their strategy to saturate the public space with tort tales and shape public opinion, see
Marc Galanter, An Oil Strike in Hell: Contemporary Legends About the Civil Justice System, 40
Auz. L. REV. 717 (1998) [hereinafter Galanter, Oil Strike]; MARK A. SMITH, BUSINESS &
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: PUBLIC OPINION, ELECTIONS, & POLITICAL POWER (2000).
11. The literature from socio-legal scholars is abundant. For one impressive law review
article, see generally Marc Galanter, Real World Torts: An Antidote to Anecdote, 55 MD. L. REV.
1093 (1996).
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In particular, analysts emphasize how the media dramatize, personalize,
fragmentize, and normalize narratives of events and relationships, thus
reconstructing complex social relations and policy issues in simplistic,
systematically skewed ways. Our own aggregate content analysis (not
reported herein) shows how news coverage of tort litigation by reporters
relying on these routine institutional conventions produces a consistent
portrait of legal action that parallels in form and substance the selective,
simplistic anecdotal portrayals of civil legal practice disseminated by
tort reformers. 2 When one adds to such patterns in coverage evidence
that tort reformers actively work to spin events for reporters and are
over-represented as sources in news reports, it is not surprising that
media coverage generally has echoed tort reform advocates’ accounts of
the legal system and made them a staple of conventional wisdom in
American legal culture.
The third dimension of our study looks at the ideological propensities in American society that constitute the terrains of shared meaning in
which the above-noted instrumental contests and institutional practices
have developed. 3 Specifically, we are interested in how powerful, if
indeterminate, norms of individual responsibility and suspicion toward
formal state intervention in socio-economic life figure into the dominant
social constructions of tort law practice. 4 In particular, we refer to the
“ethic of individualism” that “emphasizes self-reliance, toughness, and
autonomy – qualities that are posed as being central to progress and ‘getting along’ in a market economy.”‘ 5 Indeed, we shall show in coming pages how both popular news accounts and conservative pundits
together have reinforced inherited inclinations to focus on individual
irresponsibility, negligence, and greed of plaintiffs rather than on corporate accountability, state obligations to secure citizen welfare, or the lim12. Judith Aks, Anne Bloom, William Haltom, and Michael W. McCann, Hegemonic Tales
and Subversive Statistics: A Twenty-Year Study of News Reporting about Civil Litigation
(unpublished paper presented at the 2000 meeting of Law and Society Association, Miami,
Florida) (on file with authors) [hereinafter Aks, Bloom, Haltom, & McCann, Hegemonic Tales
and Subversive Statistics].
13. By “ideology,” we do not mean a grand, coherent, cohesive body of abstract ideas that
determines action. Rather, we have in mind something similar to what Ewick and Silbey outline:
a complex process that shapes social life by inviting as well as delimiting the thinking and
imagination of subjects. “Ideology derives from and reflects back upon shared experiences,
particularly those of power; it is inextricably tied to practical consciousness.” EwICK & SILBEY,
THE COMMON PLACE OF LAW, supra note 2, at 225.
14. On how different versions of individualism either support or stigmatize rights claiming in
personal injury disputes, see generally David Engel, The Oven Bird’s Song: Insiders, Outsiders,
and Personal Injuries in an American Town, in CAROL J. GREENHOUSE, BARBARA YNGVESSON, &
DAVID M. ENGEL, LAW AND COMMUNITY IN THREE AMERICAN TOWNS (1994). See also David M.
Engel, The Oven Bird’s Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Town, 18
LAW & Soc’Y REV. 551 (1984).
15. GREENHOUSE ET AL., supra note 14, at 173.
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its of our regulatory/social insurance systems as the key issues at stake
in civil legal contests. As such, the emphasis on individual choices and
volitional contracts that are sewn into American law are confirmed and
reinforced by the stories that we, as Americans, tell ourselves about the
law and the law’s promises. This will be illustrated not only by the
individualized, decontextualized, morally simplistic representations of
the McDonald’s scalding coffee dispute in popular culture, but even further by the triumph of accounts that essentially reversed the official legal
findings of responsibility and blamed the victim for her severe injuries,
not to mention her excessive greed. 16
Our analysis of the McDonald’s Coffee Case incorporates all three
analytical dimensions. We emphasize systematic selectivity in news
coverage narratives regarding a specific liability case – that is, institutional practices. We show some of the evidence of effective spin on the
coffee scalding incident by proponents of tort reform as well as ineffectively articulated responses among opponents of tort reform – that is,
instrumental tactics. Apparent throughout this case study will be the
pervasive cultural power of tales portraying irresponsibly greedy litigants and a legal system that fails to apportion individual responsibility
justly. In short, our analysis attempts to provide insights into the complex, multi-dimensional process by which narrative constructions in the
courtroom, the press, and popular culture transformed the complaint of a
badly burned grandmother into an icon for runaway litigiousness.
While we begin our analysis with our own detailed account regarding the coffee spill incident and the evolution of the legal dispute, we
want to make clear that our primary aim is not to contrast later popularized stories with what “actually happened.” Nor does our account presume that either the specific verdict or the settlement in the McDonald’s
Coffee Case was correct or just. Rather, our greatest interest is in
exploring how some story lines (such as those focusing on blame) about
law came to dominate our culture rather than other story lines and specifically why so little of the interpretive account that won at trial survived in the media while contrary accounts flourished. As such, our
enterprise is an explicitly social constructionist analysis that emphasizes
both the substantive content of cultural stories or narratives about law
and the complex processes by which they rise to prominence over
time. ”
16. There is no small irony in the fact that the same legal logic that individualizes and
commodifies the mechanisms of relief for injury can be turned toward characterizing rights
claimants as rapacious and irresponsible individuals. See Richard L. Abel, Torts, in THE PoLrTcs
OF LAW: A PROGRESSIVE CRITIQUE 445 (David Kairys ed., 3d ed. 1998) [hereinafter Abel, Torts].
17. This is to say we are not offering a “gap” study regarding the distance between the law
on the books and legal practice. Rather, we are attempting to expand exploration regarding how
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
Moreover, we recognize that our study has potentially important
implications for critically evaluating recent political contests over tort
reform proposals. Specifically, our account suggests that the cartoonish
construction of the legal dispute over spilled coffee that raced throughout American culture during the late 1990s rendered virtually impossible
any intelligent deliberation about the case’s inherent reasonableness or
justice, much less its larger policy significance for legal reform. Our
argument, however, neither depends on nor seeks to demonstrate the
proposition that the alleged “litigation explosion” or “legal lottery” system and triumph of irresponsible rights-claiming that the McDonald’s
Coffee Case came to symbolize lacks empirical confirmation, although
we generally are convinced by social science scholarship that it does.’ 8
Rather, our inquiry looks beyond specific policy matters to much
broader concerns about the dynamics of legal culture. Beyond elite policy contests, we suspect that the stories circulated by tort reform advocates and reproduced to some degree by popular media more importantly
shape the very perceptions and practices, or legal consciousness, ‘ 9 of
citizens in their various roles as legal actors – e.g., as real and potential
litigants, jurors, lawyers, judges, risk managers, and the like. In short,
the stories that routinely circulate about the law shape the very practices
of law in important ways. We will offer a few thoughts and suggestive
evidence regarding this broadly conservative cultural impact at the conclusion of our analysis.
stories in and about law develop cultural power and the implications of these processes for legal
understanding and practice.
18. See Marc Galanter, The Tort Panic and After: A Commentary, 16 JusT. SYs. J. 1, 3 (1993)
[hereinafter Galanter, Tort Panic]; Marc Galanter, News from Nowhere: The Debased Debate on
Civil Justice, 71 DEv. U. L. REV. 77 (1993) [hereinafter Galanter, News from Nowhere]; Marc
Galanter, The Day After the Litigation Explosion, 46 MD. L. REV. 3 (1986); Marc Galanter,
Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and Don’t Know (And Think We Know)
About Our Allegedly Contentious and Litigious Society, 31 UCLA L. REV. 4 (1983) [hereinafter
Galanter, Reading The Landscape]; Michael Rustad, In Defense of Punitive Damages in Products
Liability: Testing Tort Anecdotes with Empirical Data, 78 IowA L. REV. 12, 15 (1992); Michael
Rustad & Thomas Koenig, The Historical Continuity of Punitive Damages Awards: Reforming the
Tort Reformers, 42 AM. U. L. REv. 1269, 1307-08 (1993); Michael J. Saks, Do We Really
Know Anything about the Behavior of the Tort Litigation System – And Why Not?, 140 U. PA. L.
REv. 1147, 1245 (1992) [hereinafter Saks, Do We Really Know Anything]; Michael J. Saks,
Malpractice Misconceptions and Other Lessons about the Litigation System, 16 JusT. Sys. J. 7
(1993). Our larger project will summarize in detail the many studies relevant to claims about the
hyperlitigious society.
19. The term “legal consciousness” “refers to the ongoing, dynamic process of constructing
one’s understanding of, and relationship to, the social world through use of legal conventions and
discourses.” MICHAEL MCCANN, RIGHTS AT WORK: PAY EQUITY REFORM AND THE POLITICS OF
LEGAL MOBILIZATION 7 (1994). See also EwICK & SILBEY, THE COMMON PLACE OF LAW, supra
note 2.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LEGAL DISPUTE
We begin with a detailed review of the legal dispute over hot coffee
itself. Our case study will be organized generally in terms of the disputing approach familiar to “law and society” scholars. As such, we begin
with the initial incident and then trace the evolution of the dispute
through the stages of grievance, claiming, lawyer involvement, filed
claims, trial, and post-trial settlement. Along the way, we will emphasize the key facts and interpretive accounts by which the dispute was
waged among the growing list of actors.2°
A GRIEVANT BECOMES A CLAIMANT: Ms. LIEBECK
SEEKS RECOMPENSE2 ‘
On February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck purchased a cup of coffee
from a drive-through window at an Albuquerque McDonald’s. At the
time, the seventy-nine year-old Ms. Liebeck had recently retired as a
department store salesclerk in Tucson and moved to Santa Fe to live
with her daughter, Nancy Tiano. Ms. Liebeck was sitting in the passenger seat of a Ford Probe driven by her grandson, Chris Tiano, a college
graduate and Helpant golf pro. They had traveled to Albuquerque to
drop off Ms. Liebeck’s son, Jim (uncle of Chris Tiano), at the airport for
an early flight. Mr. Tiano pulled into McDonald’s for breakfast shortly
after 8:00 am, where Ms. Liebeck ordered an Egg McMuffin value meal
and the coffee. After her grandson pulled the car away from the window
and fully stopped by a curb in the parking lot, Ms. Liebeck tried to
remove the cup’s lid to add sugar and cream. Lacking a flat surface
inside the small car, she placed the coffee between her legs to free up
both her hands for prying off the lid. As the lid came off, the Styrofoam
cup tipped, spilling all the coffee into her lap, where it was rapidly
soaked up by her sweatpants.22 Ms. Liebeck screamed in pain, but Mr.
Tiano did not understand, later relating that it at first seemed to be “no
big deal.” “When it happened, I thought, well, you know, we spilled a
cup of coffee; it’s basically our fault. You know it was our clumsiness
that spilled the coffee.” After all, spilling coffee or some other hot liq20. See generally Richard E. Miller & Austin Sarat, Grievances, Claims, and Disputes:
Assessing the Adversary Culture, 15 LAW & Soc’v REV. 525 (1980); Lynn Mather & Barbara
Yngvesson, Language, Audience, and the Transformation of Disputes, 15 LAW & Soc’Y REV.
775 (1980).
21. The details of the Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurant case come from the trial transcript.
Record, Liebeck v. McDonald’s Rest., P.T.S., Inc., No. CV-93-02419, 1995 WL 360309 (N.M.
Dist. Ct. Aug. 18, 1994) (on file with authors) [hereinafter Liebeck Record]. The record is an
electronic file and page-cites are unavailable, however, the transcript is on file with the authors.
22. Ms. Liebeck’s initial letter to McDonald’s estimated that the spill took place less than four
minutes after the coffee was served to her. (on file with author) [hereinafter, Liebeck letter].
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
uid on oneself is a common occurrence; “It was just a scald,” he said
repeatedly in his deposition.
The grandson then proceeded to drive out of the parking lot, until a
minute later when his grandmother became quite nauseous, and he suspected she was in shock. Now realizing that the incident was serious, he
pulled over to the side of the road, helped her out of the car, aided her in
removing the sweatpants, and covered her with a sheet from the car’s
trunk. Mr. Tiano then headed for the nearest hospital, which was full,
and then made his way to a second hospital, where Ms. Liebeck was
admitted. Doctors determined that the hot coffee had caused third
degree bums on her thighs, buttocks, genitals, and groin area – about
6% of her body – and lesser bums over 16% of her body.23 Third
degree bums are extreme injuries in that they penetrate through the full
thickness of the skin to the subcutaneous fat, muscle, and bone. Ms.
Liebeck stayed in the hospital for over a week, where she underwent
treatment by a vascular surgeon and eventually was subjected to a regimen of very painful skin grafts. The surgeon, Dr. Arredondo, reported
that her injuries added up to one of the worst bum cases from hot liquids
he had ever treated. Due to considerable medical costs, Ms. Liebeck left
the hospital earlier than recommended and had to be driven back to the
doctor for medical treatment many days by her daughter, who was
forced to take time off from work. Ms. Liebeck suffered great discomfort, lost over twenty pounds, was permanently disfigured, and was partially disabled for up to two years following the accident.
A member of a long-time Republican family, Ms. Liebeck had
never filed a lawsuit in her life and did not immediately seek relief with
the aid of a lawyer, judge, or jury.2 4 But she also was aware that a
simple coffee spill should not have caused such extensive injuries. Ms.
Liebeck explained her grievance in a letter sent to McDonald’s Restaurants on March 13, 1992, two weeks after the incident:
It seems to me that no person would find it reasonable to have been
given coffee so hot that it would do the severe damage it did to my
skin. Obviously, it was undrinkable in that it would have burnt my
mouth. It seems that the reasonable expectation for a spilling accident would be a mess and a reddening of the skin at worst. Although
I did the spilling, I had no warning that the coffee was that hot. It
should never have been given to a customer at that temperature. 25
In short, while acknowledging that she was responsible for the acci23. RALPH NADER & WESLEY J. SMITH, No CONTEST: CORPORATE LAWYERS & THE
PERVERSION OF JUSTICE IN AMERICA 268 (1996) [hereinafter NADER & SMITH, No CONTEST].
24. Liebeck letter, supra note 22.
25. Id.
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dent, Ms. Liebeck’s initial grievance was translated into a claim about a
dangerously defective product that caused severe injuries for which the
McDonald’s corporation was liable. If routine coffee spills cause such
damage and disability as experienced in this episode, after all, most people would also be partially disabled, subjected to considerable pain, and
permanently disfigured during their lifetime. Still, Liebeck’s initial letter made it clear that she had “no intention of suing or asking for unreasonable recompense. 26 She asked for three responses from the
corporation: (1) to check the coffee machine and coffee-making process
to see if it was faulty; (2) to reevaluate the temperature standards for
coffee served to customers, for others must have been severely injured
as well; and (3) to cover medical, recuperation, and incidental costs
related to her injuries, which initially were left unspecified because the
medical treatment was far from over at that time.27 Later estimates for
incurred costs have varied in different accounts, but they hovered around
$10,000-15,000 for medical bills, plus other directly related expenditures, for a total of around $20,000. After six months of her grievance
without the counsel of a lawyer, however, McDonald’s refused her
requests for a change of policy and offered only $800 for personal
compensation.
A CLAIMANT BECOMES A LITIGANT: LAWYERS ATTEMPT TO
SETTLE THE DISPUTE
Frustrated by her inability to secure compensation for the physical
and financial harm wrought by the scalding accident, Liebeck retained
Kenneth R. Wagner and Associates, an Albuquerque law firm, in the fall
of 1992. Through a legal Helpant at the firm, Wagner learned of S.
Reed Morgan, a Houston attorney who had settled a similar case against
McDonald’s involving scalding coffee (for $27,500) in the late 1980s.
Morgan was contacted and agreed to take on Liebeck’s cause, in large
part because he had been angered by what he saw as callous indifference
displayed by the mega-corporation in the previous dispute. Morgan
quickly issued a formal request for $90,000 to cover Liebeck’s medical
expenses as well as pain and suffering. His amended claim fared no
better than Ms. Liebeck’s original claim, however, and was dismissed by
McDonald’s.
Mr. Morgan filed a formal complaint on behalf of Ms. Liebeck in
the Second Judicial District Court, County of Bemalillo, New Mexico.28
26. Id.
27. Id.
28. Complaint, Liebeck v. McDonald’s Rest., P.T.S., Inc., 1995 WL 360309 (N.M. Dist. Ct.
1994) (No. CV-93-02419).
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The complaint alleged that the coffee that Liebeck purchased from
McDonald’s in 1992 was defective in two regards: First, it was excessively, dangerously hot; Second, inadequate warnings were provided
regarding the risks posed by the hot coffee. The key legal claim was
that the coffee breached warranties of fitness for its intended purpose of
consumption under the Uniform Commercial Code. 29 Along with the
claim for compensatory damages, punitive damages were requested on
the reasoning that McDonald’s sold the coffee with reckless indifference
to the safety and welfare of its customers. Once the trial date was set,
Mr. Morgan offered to settle the case for $300,000, with no success. He
later acknowledged that he would have settled for rather less, perhaps as
little as half as much.
Just a few days before the trial, Judge Robert H. Scott ordered the
disputing parties to participate in a mediation session. Based on earlier
cases and a projection of what a jury would likely award, the mediator
recommended a settlement of $225,000. Once again, however, McDonald’s refused the opportunity to negotiate a settlement. The trial commenced in the second week of August 1994.
A LITIGANT BECOMES A PLAINTIFF: ADVERSARIES FRAME THE
ACCIDENT IN LEGAL TERMS
The trial produced relatively few important disagreements regarding the facts of the case. For example, McDonald’s did not contest that
the coffee was very hot or that hot coffee can severely scald customers.
Conversely, Ms. Liebeck did not contest that she spilled the coffee on
herself or that she was responsible for the accident. While the adversaries disagreed about some details, those issues by themselves could not
determine a just outcome.
Rather, the case turned on contending interpretive arguments, or
narratives, devised by each side to select, support, and make sense of the
evidence in a coherent, compelling way. Just as in larger policy contests, lawyers in legal proceedings use narrative techniques to construct
events in ways that are most favorable to their clients. Indeed, civil
disputes typically can be understood in term of contending “causal stories” that attempt to identify different levels of responsibility or fault
among different parties.” We identify below two very general interpretive accounts projected by lawyers for the two parties in the McDonald’s
Coffee Case.
29. Implied Warranty: Merchantability & Usage of Trade, U.C.C. § 2-314 (1977).
30. See generally DEBORAH A. STONE, POLICY PARADOX & POLITICAL REASON 147-65
(1988); JOHN M. CONLEY & WILLIAM M. O’BARR, RULES VERSUS RESPONSIBILITY: THE
ETHNOORAPHY OF LEGAL DISCOURSE (1990).
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THE DEFECTIVE PRODUCTS LIABILITY NARRATIVE
Attorneys for Ms. Liebeck systematically labored to present the
jury with a coherent and compelling interpretation of the scalding accident that focused on the inordinately hot coffee produced and sold by
McDonald’s. This Defective Products Liability Narrative combined
basics of products liability law with supporting themes that suited the
circumstances of the accident to legal categories. The relevant products
liability law came straight from the Uniform Commercial Code’s
implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. Attorney Morgan
confirmed that the plaintiff had relied on very basic business law: “The
heart of the case [was that] the product was defectively designed… It
wasn’t a negligence case. We didn’t even plead negligence. Just products liability… The individual responsibility is not the issue. The product is unreasonably dangerous.”3 Media coverage would consistently
state that Ms. Liebeck believed that the spill was McDonald’s fault.
Technically speaking, she claimed instead that McDonald’s had failed to
abide by standards that many or most businesses must meet.32
To complement the implied warranties, Plaintiff Liebeck marshaled
supporting themes. The first theme acknowledged that coffee spills
were routine events but insisted that Liebeck’s injuries were extremely
atypical due to McDonald’s dangerously hot coffee. This factual contention would place McDonald’s in conflict with the implied warranties
discussed above. Liebeck’s attorney established this conflict via a number of points. He presented as evidence a McDonald’s manual specifying that coffee should be made at temperatures between 195 and 205
degrees and served at temperatures between 180 and 190 degrees. Morgan then introduced testimony by two experts – Dr. Kenneth Diller,
Chairman of Mechanical Engineering and Bio-Mechanical Engineering
at the University of Texas and Dr. Charles Baxter of Southwestern Medical School and the Baxter Wound Center – regarding the severe bums
that such hot coffee produces. Specifically, they confirmed that liquids
between 180 and 190 degrees cause full thickness, third degree, highly
painful and disfiguring bums within 2-7 seconds, which in many cases is
before spilled coffee can be wiped off or clothing can be removed. The
time that it takes for liquids to bum skin with equal severity increases
greatly as the temperature descends toward 130 degrees. To illustrate
31. Interview with S. Reed Morgan, in San Antonio, Tex. (Mar. 23, 2000).
32. We do not mean to be unfair to mass media. Generalist reporters should not be expected
to understand tort law, perhaps. We suggest two propositions however: (1) that excusing the
dissemination of misinformation holds reporters to such a low standard as to be self-defeating; and
(2) if reporters may not be expected to know, learn, or report settled law, inadequacies of reporting
and the ready availability of misinformation are inevitable.
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the point, Ms. Liebeck testified about the extent of her painful injuries,
and graphic pictures of her severely burned and scarred skin were introduced along with doctor’s statements to show the damage that the
extremely hot coffee caused in only a few seconds. Beyond the plaintiff
and her experts, a McDonald’s quality assurance supervisor himself
admitted that McDonald’s served coffee that would scald:
REED MORGAN: [Y]ou know, as a matter of fact, that coffee is a
hazard, selling it at 180 to 190 degrees, don’t you?
CHRISTOPHER APPELTON: I have testified before, the fact that
this coffee can cause bums.
MORGAN: It is hazardous at this temperature?
APPLETON: At that high temperature the coffee is a hazard.
MORGAN: If customers attempt to swallow that coffee, isn’t it a fact
that it will scald their throat or esophagus?
APPLETON: Yes, under those conditions, if they could get the coffee
in their throat, that could happen, yes …. 33
A second theme in the products liability frame was that most customers are not aware of this danger posed by coffee served at these
temperatures. This theme was important to underscore that McDonald’s
was vending an unfit product to customers who could not be presumed
to know about or make provision for the coffee’s extreme temperature.
Morgan used two studies – one by a Restaurant Advisory Services consultant showing that home coffee makers produce coffee at 158-168
degrees and hold it at 150-157 degrees after three minutes; the other
from his earlier case showing that McDonald’s served their coffee at
temperatures well higher than most other fast food restaurants – to
demonstrate that McDonald’s coffee was significantly hotter than most
coffee that consumers make for themselves or purchase elsewhere. This
was critical, for while Ms. Liebeck spilled the coffee on herself, she had
no reasonable expectation that it would be so unusually hot and dangerous. Another expert for the plaintiff, Lila Laux, testified in support of
this contention.34
The third critical theme was that McDonald’s knew what their customers did not know about these dangers from its hot coffee. Critical
facts offered in evidence for this position included that McDonald’s had
received over 700 complaints about hot coffee in the previous decade
33. NADER & SMrrH, No CONTEST, supra note 23.
34. Greenlee, Kramer v. Java World, supra note 6, at 720. The deposition by Mr. Tiano, Ms.
Liebeck’s grandson, is evidence that most consumers do not know of the dangers at stake. He
indicated he could not imagine the severity of injury suffered by his grandmother even while
witnessing her screams of pain. Reed Morgan restated the point concisely: “Why would you
blame a person using a dangerous product for their behavior if they are not abusing the product?
That’s a foreseeable risk of harm, dumping a cup of coffee in your lap.” Interview with S. Reed
Morgan, in San Antonio, Tex. (Mar. 23, 2000).
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and had paid out nearly three quarters of a million dollars to settle such
claims, including some payments of up to $66,000. The case settled by
Reed Morgan in the late 1980s, in which Morgan presented graphic evidence of third degree bums, was just one of such complaints. Against
this contention, Dr. Robert Knaff, a safety consultant for McDonald’s,
offered that 700 complaints of bums were statistically irrelevant, “basically trivially different from zero,” relative to the large number of customers served.35
Finally, Liebeck’s attorneys alleged that McDonald’s displayed
reckless indifference to customers’ safety by doing nothing either to
reduce the heat of coffee known to be dangerous or to provide adequate
warning to customers. Morgan noted that a message “CAUTION:
CONTENTS HOT” appeared on the cup, but it was difficult to read
because it was the same color and size as the ornamental trim on the
cup.36 McDonald’s admitted that the message was intended more as a “reminder” than as a warning. What is more, the plaintiffs urged, the
motive that trumped the corporation’s concerns for safety was well documented: the desire to lure more customers, to sell more coffee, and to
earn greater profits. By emphasizing this pecuniary motive, the plaintiffs attempted to strip the mega-corporation of its family-friendly marketing mask and to expose the fearsome Goliath that the David-like
plaintiff was challenging.
More than plaintiffs arguments alone supported this final theme.
The aforementioned Christopher Appleton, having testified that McDonald’s coffee was not “fit for consumption” when served, further admitted
that he had been shown the injurious effects of hot coffee in the earlier
case presented by Reed Morgan, but the company still did nothing.
REED MORGAN: Isn’t it a fact that back in 1988, when I showed
you the pictures of the young lady that was burned in that situation,
that you were appalled and surprised that coffee could cause that kind
of burn?
CHRISTOPHER APPLETON: Yes, I had never seen photographs
like that before.
MORGAN: All right. In those six years, you still have not attempted,
yourself, or know of anyone within the corporation that has attempted
to find out the rate of speed, the lack of margin of safety in serving
coffee at this temperature right ….
35. Andrea Gerlin, How Jury Gave $2.9 Million for Coffee Spill, McDonald’s Callousness
was Real Issue, Jurors Say in Case of Burned Woman, PI-rSBURGH POST GAZETTE, Sept. 4, 1994,
at B2 [hereinafter Gerlin, How Jury].
36. Grandson Mr. Tiano said in his deposition that there was not a warning on the cup,
underlining that the words were difficult to identify and read. Liebeck Record, supra note 21.
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APPLETON: No, we have not.37
All four of these themes were framed as key elements in the legal
claim that, under the Uniform Commercial Code, McDonald’s coffee
represented an unreasonably dangerous product sold in breach of the
implied warranty of fitness, and that the corporation thus was liable for
injuries suffered by Ms. Liebeck. As we have seen, McDonald’s quality
assurance supervisor conceded that McDonald’s coffee was not fit for
human consumption when poured. He further acknowledged that the
McDonald’s corporation did not have a systematic mechanism for
informing itself about the severity of injuries caused by its products or
for determining how many injuries would justify adjusting the heat of
the coffee served. Most such information was only known by the company’s insurance agency.38 Mr. Appleton unabashedly acknowledged
that “there are more serious dangers in restaurants” than hot coffee and
“there is no current plan to change the procedure [for coffee making]
that we’re using in that regard now.”
Reed Morgan presented all such testimony to support his call for
punitive damages to punish the callous indifference of the family restaurant chain toward its customers. The closing argument by the plaintiff’s
lawyers noted that McDonald’s sells over a billion cups of coffee a year,
generating revenues of $1.35 million each day from such coffee, and
that payment of two days’ revenue from coffee might constitute a reasonable basis for punitive damages. As attorney Ken Wagner later summarized, “We said in order to send a message, you have to penalize
them financially before the message will get to corporate headquarters in
respect to serving coffee at this temperature.”
THE INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY NARRATIVE
Defendant McDonald’s had conceded many facts at the core of the
plaintiffs products liability frame, but countered by emphasizing different facts framed in an alternative interpretive story about the incident.
The defendants advanced what we label the Individual Responsibility
Narrative to state their case. The basic logic of this story line is that
people spill coffee on themselves all the time but do not expect others to
take responsibility for the outcomes, however terrible. In short, a commonplace event like a coffee spill merited a commonsense response, the
37. NADER & SMITH, No CONTEST, supra note 23, at 271.
38. Morgan told us in an interview that he learned this from his earlier action against
McDonald’s. “Unless there’s some reason for somebody that works for the corporation to get
intimately involved, they’re probably misinformed. They really don’t understand what they’re
doing to people.” Interview with S. Reed Morgan, San Antonio, Tex. (Mar. 23, 2000). Records
of attorneys’ efforts to obtain information from within the corporate bureaucracy support the
inadequate information system in the company.
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same one Mr. Tiano immediately had: The spill was Grandmother’s
fault, not McDonald’s.
The defense advanced specific themes that organized evidence to
support this approach. First, the defense appealed to the ethic of individual responsibility deeply rooted in American culture. Ms. Liebeck,
not McDonald’s, spilled the coffee that resulted in injuries; she must
accept the blame. Ms. Liebeck’s own letter of March 13, admitting that
she had spilled the coffee on herself, was particularly relevant. Noting
that the placement of coffee between her knees while sitting in the car
and failing to remove her clothes immediately were “unwise,” defense
attorneys insisted that Ms. Liebeck should accept responsibility for the
lamentable accident.
A second theme was directly aimed at challenging the plaintiffs
key scientific point regarding proximate cause of the injury. McDonald’s presented an affidavit from Turner M. Osler, a bum specialist, contending that Ms. Liebeck might have received the same bums if the
coffee had been less hot, as low as 130’F.39 Major reasons for the bad
burns in this case, the expert testified, included Ms. Liebeck’s advanced
age and her failure to remove her clothing soaked with the coffee in a
timely fashion.
A third theme turned on the question of “Why pick on us?” The
attorneys for McDonald’s argued that systematic marketing studies,
presented as evidence, showed that customers prefer their coffee very
hot. In fact, this was one of the most appealing traits of McCoffee. One
leading reason is that most customers do not drink the coffee immediately after purchase at drive-through windows, but typically wait until
they arrive at the office or home. At the same time, it was shown that
some other restaurants, and especially those leading in coffee sales, tend
to serve their coffee at nearly the same high temperature as McDonald’s.
Indeed, McDonald’s provided evidence that their specifications followed
industry standards. Experts for the defense also testified about the
highly quality of insulation in their cups and the special plastic tab on
the tops of coffee cups that reduce the chance of burning. Far from
being insensitive to customers, the defense contended, McDonald’s hot
coffee served in state-of-the-art containers was just what the public
wanted.
Finally, the defense attorneys played on a theme at the heart of the
tort reform campaign, implying that Ms. Liebeck’s claim was an example of litigious plaintiff seeking damages for harms that she, however
unfortunate, caused to herself. Attorney Tracy McGee summarized this
39. The plaintiffs challenged that Mr. Osler left out of his account the significantly varying
amounts of exposure time required for extreme bums by liquids at different temperatures.
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aspect of her case to Newsweek reporters. “The real question… is how
far you want our society to go to restrict what most of us enjoy and
accept.”4 Ms. McGee fended off the plaintiff’s attempt to introduce
evidence from previous scalding litigation by deriding the claims: “First
person accounts of sundry women whose nether regions have been
scorched by McDonald’s coffee might well be worthy of Oprah … But
they have no place in a court of law.”4 As such, the themes of the
defense supported individual responsibility with notions of fairness and
common sense, as opposed to the strict letter of business law.
A PLAINTIFF BECOMES A VICTOR: JURORS ADOPT MOST OF
Ms. LIEBECK’S ACCOUNT
After a tedious trial over seven days, the jurors took but four hours
to reach their verdict: McDonald’s Restaurants owed Ms. Liebeck
$160,000 in compensatory damages and about $2,700,000 in punitive
damages. In calculating compensatory damages, the jury synthesized
the contrasting claims and frames into a slightly mixed verdict. The jury
agreed with the defense that Ms. Liebeck was responsible for her own
accident to a degree. However, the jury fixed the degree of the plaintiff’s contribution to the accident at 20%. Assessing the expenses, pain
and suffering, disfigurement, and disability consequent to the accident,
jurors awarded compensatory damages of $200,000 for the accident.
Since they held Ms. Liebeck to be one-fifth responsible for her accident,
the jury then discounted the compensatory award by $40,000 (one-fifth
of $200,000), which left the plaintiff $160,000 in compensatory damages. Jurors had come to see McDonald’s coffee as a product made
hazardous by extreme heat, a dangerous brew for which the corporation
had to bear primary liability even if Ms. Liebeck was partly responsible
for her own injuries.
Beyond specific damages, jurors had come to see the Liebeck episode as an example of a stream of dangerously hot coffee flowing from
drive-thrus and across counters. Jurors accepted the plaintiff’s characterization of McDonald’s and other outlets that serve steaming coffee as
recklessly indifferent to consumers’ safety. To dissuade McDonald’s
and others from continuing their willful indifference, the jury granted
the punitive award – damages designed to deter a wrong-doer from
continued bad conduct – recommended by Ms. Liebeck’s lawyers: $2.7
million, the number based on an estimate of two days’ revenues from
coffee at McDonald’s restaurants nationwide. Remarkably, the award
40. Aric Press, Ginny Carroll & Steven Waldman, Are Lawyers Burning America?,
NEWSWEEK, Mar. 20, 1995, at 35 [hereinafter, Press, Are Lawyers].
41. Gerlin, How Jury, supra note 35.
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that would create such alarm among editorialists and other professional
chatterers had been scaled back from several jurors’ arguments for
awarding a full week’s coffee grosses at McDonald’s, around $9.6
million!
As always, public indications of the logic behind the jurors’ judgment were sparse. Still, remarks on the record, along with the award,
confirm that jurors were convinced by the key themes of the plaintiffs
narrative about corporate liability for a defective product. Jurors who
spoke to interviewers frankly admitted that they initially thought the
case was a waste of their time. For example, jury foreman Jerry Goens
told a reporter that he “wasn’t convinced as to why I need to be there to
settle a coffee spill,” implying his predisposition toward the “individual
responsibility” narrative of the defense before the trial. 2 Another juror
felt insulted: “The whole thing sounded ridiculous to me.”43
In contrast, the plaintiff’s attorneys’ construction of the case
changed their minds. Several jurors commented on the strength of the
scientific evidence regarding how quickly coffee burns skin at 180
degrees as well as the graphic photos of Liebeck’s injuries. When juror
Jack Elliott learned of Liebeck’s seven days in the hospital and of her
skin grafts, he said, “It made me come home and tell my wife and
daughters don’t drink coffee in the car, at least not hot.”44 Mr. Elliot
concluded from testimony by a McDonald’s quality assurance executive
that McDonald’s was profoundly indifferent to burns and suffering.45
Juror Betty Farnham was so unimpressed by the claim that 700 complaints were trivial relative to the millions of cups that McDonald’s
served that she began to doubt that the corporation could see the human
suffering underlying the statistics.46 She concluded that “The facts were
so overwhelmingly against the company… They were not taking care
of their customers.”47 Another juror justified the punitive damages as a
way to get McDonald’s attention. “Their callous disregard was very
upsetting. 4a
Indeed, the plaintiff won over the jury to such an extent that the
judgment extended beyond the immediate defendant. Juror Richard
Anglada stated that the punitive damages were aimed at all restaurants
42. Id.
43. Attorney Reed Morgan confirmed this in an interview. “The first thing they [the jury] had
to get over was they thought it was a silly case.” Interview with S. Reed Morgan, San Antonio,
Tex. (Mar. 23, 2000).
44. Gerlin, How Jury, supra note 35.
45. Id.
46. Id.
47. Id.
48. NADER & SMITH, No CONTEST, supra note 23, at 270.
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that poured excessively-hot coffee: “The coffee’s too hot out there. This
happened to be McDonald’s.”4′ 9 Juror Roxanne Bell echoed the point,
recalling “It was our way of saying, ‘Hey, open your eyes. People are
getting burned.’ 50
Not surprisingly, attorneys for McDonald’s promised to appeal the
case. However, there is some evidence that some corporate insiders
took the verdict to heart, at least initially. An Albuquerque news investigator reported that the temperature of coffee at a local McDonald’s
shortly after the trial fell to 158 degrees.5′ Moreover, the lids of coffee
cups began to carry the clear warning “HOT! HOT! HOT” and admonitions that “Coffee, tea, and hot chocolate are VERY HOT!” soon were
routinely posted at most McDonald’s drive-thrus.52
A VICTORY BECOMES LESS SPECTACULAR: JUDGE SCOTT
REMITS THE PUNITIVE DAMAGES
Trial judge Robert H. Scott on September 14, 1994 reduced the
punitive damages from nearly $2.7 million to $480,000, somewhat ironically using the tort reformers’ own preferred formula of “three times the
awarded compensatory damages” as the upper limit. He did not set
aside the verdict or adjust compensatory damages, however. Instead, he
agreed with the jurors on key findings. He concurred with them that
testimony and evidence showed that McDonald’s knew or should have
known that its coffee was too hot and unfit for consumption, that
McDonald’s and its employees were indifferent to consumer safety, and
that McDonald’s undertook inadequate efforts to warn its customers. He
stated that the punitive damage award was appropriate to deter, punish,
and warn McDonald’s.53 After Morgan’s appeal challenging the
reduced damages was denied, Judge Scott ordered another conference
(as he had done before the trial) that produced a final confidential settlement for an undisclosed amount.
In sum, the legal narrative of Ms. Liebeck’s grievance and claim
regarding a defective, dangerous coffee product won hands down in a
court of law even though the award she received was only about onefifth of that initially authorized by the jury.
49. Cheryl Laird & Steven Long, Hot Coffee Becomes a Burning Issue, HOUSTON
CHRONICLE, Aug. 19, 1994, at 1.
50. Press, Are Lawyers, supra note 40, at 35.
51. Gerlin, How Jury, supra note 35, at B2.
52. Greenlee, Kramer v. Java World, supra note 6, at 723-24.
53. NADER & SMrTH, No CONTEST, supra note 23, at 272.
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THE PRINT MEDIA CONSTRUCT A LEGAL LEGEND
We suspected when we started this study that popular accounts significantly simplified and selectively skewed various aspects of Liebeck’s
legal challenge to McDonald’s. Our expectations were based on a substantial body of research analyzing media reporting practices. In particular, we have been influenced by political scientist Lance Bennett’s
argument that routine media practices tend to favor certain sorts of stories as especially “newsworthy.”54 Bennett identifies four specific features of newsworthiness: Personalization, Dramatization, Fragmentation,
and Normalization.55
Personalized coverage tends to focus on individual actors, acts, and
moral character to the exclusion or detriment of case-specific institutional, historical, or social contexts or dimensions. 6 Personalized coverage is related to fragmented coverage. Fragmented reporting treats
happenings as immediate and self-contained. 7 Broader contexts, systemic relations, and chronic practices tend to be slighted to emphasize
discrete vignettes. 58 As a result, particulars tend to be divorced from
general patterns and relationships.
Dramatized coverage is what we expect of news media in the age
of infotainment. To insure circulation or ratings, news is hyped. The
most sensational, surprising, or titillating aspects of events-violence
(“If it bleeds, it leads”), scandal, large amounts of money (“Dollars holler”), tragedy, fraud, etc. – are much more likely to be covered than
merely accurate, expected, or mundane aspects. News is, thus, often
about the unusual. 9
Finally, normalizing is the process of fitting “news” to “olds.”
Audiences need familiar referents and accessible scenarios if they are to
understand news easily and efficiently.60 News media presume that their
clients will be attracted to coverage that matches common norms and
expectations. 61 Normalization complements the other framing devices
by rendering hair-raising and attention-grabbing reports understandable
and by offering some reassurance along with threats.62 As the routine is
dramatized, the dramatic thus is rendered in highly conventionalized
54. See generally W. LANCE BENNETr, NEWS: THE POLITICS OF ILLUSION 21-64 (2d ed. 1988).
55. See id. at 23-24.
56. Id. at 23.
57. Id. at 24.
58. See id. at 24.
59. Id. at 23-24.
60. See id. at 24-25.
61. See id. at 25.
62. Id. at 25.
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terms as routine, typical, “normal.”6 3 Together, these elements influence
news selection and reporting practice.
We have previously used this framework to analyze a large data set
of over 4,000 newspaper articles about tort litigation in five major
national newspapers over nineteen years. Our study, reported in a paper
and our developing book, found that news coverage of tort law indeed
emphasized the dramatic, personalized, fragmented, and normalizing
tendencies that were expected.64 In particular, news coverage radically
over-represented: (1) products liability cases, relative to other types of
tort action; (2) legal filings of claims well before trial and judgments
following trials, as opposed to the complex substantive exchanges of
evidence and arguments at trial; (3) cases in which plaintiffs win claims
against corporate defendants; (4) cases with huge, multi-million dollar
judgments for the plaintiffs; and (5) experts who rail against specific
claims and judgments for plaintiffs or the overall legal system. Moreover, we found that case coverage tended to be substantively thin and
simplistic, offering very little insight into the civil litigation process, the
reasoning of participants, the terms of law at stake in disputes, or alternative institutional means attempted or available for addressing civic
disputes over injuries. In short, news coverage of civil tort disputes routinely paralleled inform and substance the simplistic tort tales circulated
by tort reformers to assail the explosion of frivolous lawsuits and irresponsible actions by all parties involved in them.
Hence, we expected newspapers to reconstruct the McDonald’s
Coffee Case to match standard understandings of “news-worthiness” :
Easy-to-understand specifics, personalized conflict, and sensationalized
results would garner far more coverage than challenging contentions
about the complexities of events, of disputing case history, of multicausal relations, or of the legal process. As a result, important facts and
interpretations critical to the jury – for example, the legal rules in the
Uniform Commercial Code and the location and timing of the accident – would be slighted or left out altogether. Second, we expected that
less familiar story lines would receive little attention while well-known
narratives would serve as defaults for journalists and readers alike. Specifically, we anticipated that the subtle elements of the plaintiff’s legally
successful, but technically complex, products liability narrative would
take a back seat to the culturally pervasive Individual Responsibility
Narrative that jurors largely rejected as less revealing. Third, we
surmised that fragmentary accounts and misleading factoids – state63. Id.
64. See Aks, Bloom, Haltom, & McCann, Hegemonic Tales and Subversive Statistics, supra
note 12.
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ments that are taken for facts by virtue of publication and dissemination
but, upon inspection, turn out to be at best problematic65 – would facilitate intercessions by reform-oriented and reform-influenced commentators to spin the case as another instance of frivolous litigation in which
the victim was blameworthy.66 As such, the Liebeck legend would only
add to the ideologically loaded, misleading, and often inaccurate knowledge about the civil legal system routinely disseminated to ordinary
Americans. With only a few exceptions, our skeptical expectations
proved extremely well founded.
GRAPH ONE
“GRAPH OF 1994 NEWSPAPER ARTICLES RELATED TO
Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants”
(Wire Reports Excluded)
A- I 2 3 4 S 6 7 8 9 10 II 12 13 14 Is 16 17 18 19 20
65. In using “factoid,” we follow NORMAN MAILER, MARILYN: A BIOGRAPHY 21 (1975) and
Saks, Do We Really Know Anything, supra note 18, at 1162. We diverge from Professor Saks in
eschewing “factlets,” his terms for highly specific details that seem to convey more information
than they actually do.
66. Readers should note the perhaps latent advantage of labeling cases “frivolous litigation.”
While “frivolous” may be used to denote the trivial or the unworthy, it may also connote idle or
playful activities. To call a case frivolous litigation, then, may be to equivocate covertly: one
may say one meant that the case was flimsy or without merit; one’s audience may take the phrase
to mean that litigants are indulging themselves in games or pastimes.
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ARTICLES
The first point to note about the hot coffee case is that it was widely
covered in the print media; the jury award was immediately reported in
at least twenty-six leading newspapers, and many scores of articles followed in subsequent years. As we shall show below, the case was
widely covered because of its easy fit into prevailing newsworthiness
conventions. Moreover, the McDonald’s Coffee Case affords the close
observer valuable insights because it generated multiple waves of coverage.6
” Graph One shows how and why we separate Liebeck news coverage, gathered through a systematic search of “Academic Universe,”68
into five discrete phases. The initial and largest spate of spot coverage
followed the announcement of the jury verdict on August 18, 1994.
After the first two days, the Liebeck case was in both the public and the
pundit domain, as we shall show. Two subsequent events might have
elicited corrective coverage of the case around September 1, 1994, so we
treated these events and their spotty coverage together as a second
phase. When Judge Scott cut the jury’s punitive award by over eighty
percent to three times the compensatory award, he inaugurated a third
phase of coverage. This phase stretched from September 14, 1994, until
December 1, 1994, when final case settlement piqued a brief fourth
phase of coverage. These developments in the dispute occasioned spot
coverage and commentaries throughout the final months of 1994.
Together with a modestly-covered but substantial article correcting initial reports, spot articles, and opinion pieces in Stages 1-4 reveal the
process by which legally successful narratives and constructions of fact
yielded to factoids and default “common sense” frames, transforming
Litigant Liebeck into Symbolic Stella. After spot reports of the settlement ended around December 2-3, 1994, an on-going fifth phase reinforced dissemination of the iconic case to the detriment of the case that
plaintiffs argued and jurors decided.
Phase Zero – Omission of Coverage Prior to the Verdict
While much of our account turns on omissions from coverage during five phases, we first note a virtual complete omission of coverage
before the first phase. The dearth of coverage prior to the jury award
made the results seem even more surprising than might otherwise have
67. WILLIAM HALTOM, REPORTING ON THE COURTS 224 (1998).
68. In June of 2000, we searched Lexis-Nexis “Academic Universe” from August 1, 1994
until December 31, 1994. Under “News,” we searched both in “General News” and in “U.S.
News,” the latter to pickup regional newspapers not accessible in the former. Our primary
keywords included: “court,” “courts,” “bum,” “bums,” “jury,” “jurors,” “coffee,” “million,” and
“award.” We then narrowed this far-flung search with the demand that all articles contain some
spellings of both “McDonald’s” and “Liebeck.”
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been the case. Had trial testimony and evidence been widely available
– as was the case in many instances of tobacco litigation, for example
– Ms. Liebeck’s victory might have seemed less inexplicable and her
claims more understandable. In noting omitted coverage, we attach no
blame to news media as we do not presume that the Liebeck case merited coverage before its denouement. We merely remind readers that, as
previously suggested, the scarcity of pre-verdict coverage left much of
the evidence and testimony under-developed and unlikely to become
developed, given demands on the press for alacrity and concision. The
failure of reporters to attend the trial or scrutinize the trial record greatly
increased the chances that a substantial judgment would generate sensational but incomplete, misleading, and even erroneous coverage shaped
by media conventions and prevailing cultural norms. Therefore, this
first omission may have been as important as other omissions we shall
note below.
NEWSPAPERS RELAY THE VERDICT: ELISION AND
IMPRECISION IN PHASE ONE
Despite under-development of the story prior to the verdict and
concomitant omissions from coverage, Phase One print reports covered
the verdict in a predictable, professional manner, repeating the standard
emphases of mainstream media. Basics of the specific accident and particular judgment – the answers to “Who?”, “What?”, “Where?”, and
other customary questions – were featured prominently in reportage.
At the same time, consistent with our general findings,6 9 the most dramatic and personalized elements were emphasized in simplistic, familiar
renderings, while subtle and complex dimensions of the trial record that
did not fit prevailing formulas were left out. This reconstruction and
fragmentation to suit newspapers’ standards became accentuated when
editorialists and commentators filled the gaps in reporting to yield spin
and factoids.
WIRE REPORTS: ROUTINE CONCISION LEADS TO TELLING ELISION
We begin with the Associated Press morning wire-service report
for three related reasons: it represented the longest and most detailed
national account; it became a basis for coverage by most newspapers in
our sample; and the Associated Press reported major developments in
later phases as well. The initial news account on August 18, 1994 is
reprinted below in its entirety as replicated on “Academic Universe.”
69. See Aks, Bloom, Haltom, & McCann, Hegemonic Tales and Subversive Statistics, supra
note 12.
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
WOMAN BURNED By HOT MCDONALD’S COFFEE GETS $2.9 MILLION
A woman who was scalded when her McDonald’s coffee spilled was
awarded nearly $2.9 million – or about two days’ coffee sales for the
fast-food chain – by a jury. Lawyers for Stella Liebeck, who suffered
third-degree bums in the 1992 incident, contended that McDonald’s
coffee was too hot. A state district court jury imposed $2.7 million in
punitive damages and $160,000 in compensatory damages Wednesday. Ken Wagner, Liebeck’s attorney, said that he had asked the jury
for punitive damages equal to two days’ worth of McDonald’s coffee
sales, which he estimated at $1.34 million a day. Testimony indicated McDonald’s coffee is served at 180-190 degrees, based on
advice from a coffee consultant who has said it tastes best that hot,
Wagner said Thursday. The lawsuit contended Liebreck’s (sic) coffee was 165-170 degrees when it spilled. In contrast, he said, coffee
brewed at home is generally 135-140 degrees. He said McDonald’s
expressed no willingness during the trial to turn down the heat or
print a warning. Defense attorney Tracy McGee already has said the
company will appeal. McGee also said the jury was “concerned
about an industrywide practice” of selling hot coffee. Juror Richard
Anglada confirmed the jury was trying to deliver a message to the
industry. “The coffee’s too hot out there (in the industry). This happened to be McDonald’s,” Anglada said Wednesday. Liebeck’s lead
counsel, Reed Morgan of Houston, said there have been several lawsuits nationally over the temperature of McDonald’s coffee but that
he believes the Liebeck case was the first to reach the verdict stage. A
California case was settled out of court for $235,000, he said.
Morgan said Wednesday the woman’s medical bills totaled
nearly $10,000.
According to testimony, Liebeck was a passenger in a car driven
by her grandson outside a McDonald’s in southeast Albuquerque
when she was burned by a cup of coffee purchased at a drive-through
window. The jury found, among other things, that the coffee was
defective and that McDonald’s engaged in conduct justifying the
punitive damages.7°
The astute reader should notice two characteristics of the account
immediately. For one thing, it is very short, simple, and thin – already
well fitted to become an anecdote. Moreover, the characteristically fragmented, disjointed presentation of information is familiar. Virtually no
signs of carefully constructed legal arguments presented by the disputing
parties, of debate over fundamental legal issues at stake or of contrasting
evidentiary claims in the trial survive the Associated Press’s reconstruction. Readers hoping to find clearly demarcated themes or well-crafted
70. AP, Woman Burned, supra note 3.
[Vol. 56:113
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legal narratives are sure to be frustrated. As such, the wire account
offers few explicit cues to make sense of what principles were at stake,
or even reason to believe that legal norms of right or justice mattered at
all.7
Beneath its surface randomness, the selection and prioritization of
information in the Associated Press story exhibits a logic that we have
encountered before and will see repeated endlessly in news coverage of
the hot coffee case. While little direct attention to substantive themes
and arguments is apparent, the information presented in the wire report
clearly displays the logic of both the newsworthiness routines discussed
above and the defendant’s specific individualistic interpretation of the
accident. Let us now examine in greater detail how the wire report
reconstructed the McDonald’s Coffee Case selectively and
tendentiously.
The first and most extensively noted information in the article –
i.e., identifying the burn injury and the award – dramatizes the case.
By far, most prominent in the wire report are the monetary figures. The
bold headline and the first, third, and fourth sentences each highlight
either the $2.7 million punitive damages award or the cumulative $2.9
million award. The fourth mention (fourth sentence) disaggregates the
total into two figures, followed by the calculus of two times $1.34 million in coffee sales to determine the punitive damages. This is important, for journalistic norms privilege placing the most important
information first, after which repetition highlights the message. Near the
end of the report, other lesser but still large sums – an earlier settlement
of $234,000 and medical bills of $10,000 – are mentioned. In short, as
any reader of wire-service stories might have predicted, “dollars holler”
from the headline through to the end of the brief report.
Conversely, the wire account somewhat surprisingly underplays the
gory details of the scalding injury that were prominent at trial. The
headline as well as the opening and closing paragraphs both note the
scalding or burns that were caused by the coffee and gave rise to the
legal claim for compensation. After this report showed readers the
money, it showed them an injury, albeit understating Ms. Liebeck’s injuries and rehabilitation while playing up the mega-verdict.
The news account also is highly personalized. Indeed, it is filled
with mentions of individual actors: Stella Liebeck; her attorneys Reed
Morgan and Kenneth Wagner; McDonald’s; one defense attorney,
Tracy McGee; and one juror, Richard Anglada. Such synecdoche
seems expedient and even efficient, but personalization deprived client
71. These characteristics also suggest that the story was relayed by journalists with little
substantive “spin” from elite interpreters with particular policy interests.
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
newspapers and readers of contextual elements. For one thing, recognition that the dispute was between a seventy-nine year old retired working-class woman with inadequate Medicare benefits and a huge multinational corporation and that the legal duel was between a personalinjury attorney and a battalion of corporate lawyers72 is almost entirely
obscured by the individualized account, which casts each agent in his or
her formal role. While “McDonald’s” appears repeatedly, the Associated Press failed to remind readers of the vast size and wealth of the
McDonald’s corporation; it is at most a “fast-food chain,” one player in
a larger “industry.” Indeed, some readers might be uncertain that the
corporation, rather than the Albuquerque franchise, was the defendant.
Moreover, the attention to the spill accident – although generally
incomplete and misleading (and later often flatly erroneous) – further
tended to reconstruct the case to suit interpretations based on individual
responsibility far more than the plaintiff’s case or the jury’s rationale.
Specifically, no mention is made that: (a) the car was parked motionless
to the side rather than at the window or moving; (b) there was little
recklessness about the action leading to the accident; or (c) the injuries
involved extreme pain, skin grafts, and sustained disability. That the
accident was indeed ordinary but the injury extraordinary – Stella
Liebeck’s fundamental claim – is difficult, at best, to discern from the
news account. In sum, personalization in this wire story favored
McDonald’s and disadvantaged Ms. Liebeck.
Important items implicating the corporation in the accident were
included in the report, but selective dramatization and personalization
pared details essential to the plaintiff’s arguments and the jury’s verdict.
As Professor Bennett has demonstrated, mass media do not merely
dramatize and personalize; through their selectivity, news media fragmentize news.73 The Associated Press, we can see, fragmentized the
coffee case by its inclusions and exclusions. The story notes that
Liebeck, her lawyer, and a juror “contended” that the “coffee was too
hot.” But the links to the defective product claim are indirect and
implicit rather than explicit. The news account also specifies that the
coffee temperature of 165-170 degrees was about thirty degrees hotter
than most home-brewed coffee and that complaints and lawsuits had
been filed previously against McDonald’s. However, the latter points,
which were pivotal to the jury, come only at the end of the news report.
Conspicuously absent are the most important elements of the plaintiff’s
defective products narrative that influenced the jury and judge: (1) the
72. While Morgan had a couple of hot liquid cases, including one hot coffee case against
McDonald’s, he was hardly a “repeat player.”
73. BENNETr, supra note 54, at 24.
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scientific evidence from two noted experts about the celerity at which
skin bums at 170-180 degrees, without which mere mention of coffee
temperatures means little; (2) the details about the plaintiffs immense
pain and disability; (3) the fact that a documented 700 complaints had
been filed against McDonald’s in recent years; (4) the fact that McDonald’s administrators admitted the company knew about and ignored the
palpable dangers of extremely hot coffee; and (5) the facts about the
early stages of the dispute, including Liebeck’s initial request for meager
compensation, the plaintiff’s multiple efforts over two years to settle
spurned by McDonald’s, the mediator’s recommended award, and the
like.
What we have previously generalized about news coverage,74 we
here particularize to wire reportage of Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants: large awards make news while crucial details are discarded to
make stories concise and accessible. Whether the discarded facts were
unknown or regarded as irrelevant or too esoteric by journalists, we can
only guess.75 But the inclusion of some key facts and exclusion of
others emphasized the large award to the plaintiff for a seemingly inconsequential mishap – a key contention in the narratives of individual
greed disseminated by tort reformers – while obscuring essential elements of the legal argument (the Defective Products Liability Narrative)
that led jurors to find the corporation responsible for the painful injury in
question. Failure to mention the legal grounding for that judgment in
the Uniform Commercial Code as well as the plaintiff’s multiple, amplyevidenced arguments leaves readers to question whether the jury acted
on either law or reason, much less both. The enigmatic final statement
of the report underlined this question. Albeit “the jury found.., that the
coffee was defective” and “punitive damages” were justified, readers
cannot be certain why jurors decided as they did.76
On balance, the concise spot-news offered by the Associated Press
thus conveyed much relevant information about the case, but it de-contextualized the accident in ways that analysts of the news have led us to
expect. The omissions and under-emphases of the wire report repeated
in many newspapers tended to discount the plaintiff’s defective product
narrative far more than the commonsensical individual responsibility
74. Aks, Bloom, Haltom, & McCann, Hegemonic Tales and Subversive Statistics, supra note
12.
75. We asked many journalists about this. Some confirmed that scientific evidence is often
considered too esoteric or technical to print in spot news. We expect that there is a routine
filtering bias at stake in this regard, which is part of the newsworthiness inclination. The most
obvious reason, however, is that no journalists were present at the trial to hear such evidence or to
obtain a clear version of it.
76. AP, Woman Burned, supra note 3.
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW [Vol. 56:113
frame of McDonald’s, which readers and journalists arguably had long
been primed to presume in making sense of public events. While nothing in the initial wire report explicitly linked Ms. Liebeck’s suit to the
alleged epidemic of silly suits afflicting the nation, the Associated Press
story reconstructed the case in a manner that left open, and even invited,
that linkage. The “man bites dog” angle of receiving $3,000,000 for
spilled coffee made this item far more newsworthy and culturally resonant but also far less accurate.
INITIAL PRINT REPORTS: MORE CONCISION; LESS PRECISION
Reports in the twenty-four newspapers in our Lexis-Nexis “Academic Universe” sample emulated the Associated Press report. 7 As
expected, the Associated Press stories were more copiously detailed than
almost all stories run by clients who edited the wire copy.78 Thus, inclusions and exclusions by the wires prevailed in newspapers. As Table
One demonstrates, newspapers varied in the wire-service inclusions they
printed, but they rarely added elements omitted by the wires.79
Three patterns in Table One characterize what made it into the
McDonald’s Coffee Case and what was filtered out. The first pattern
consists in elements uniformly included. In Table One, we can see that
four elements of the Liebeck victory were included in reports in every
newspaper in our sample: the severity of the injuries, the stupendous
award, the claim that McDonald’s coffee was too hot, and description of
the coffee spill.
A second pattern consists in elements regularly excluded alto77. The other wire services reprinted in “Academic Universe” tracked the Associated Press
story, sometimes verbatim, sometimes more briefly. Because the papers in our sample cited the
Associated Press and because the Associated Press story is expansive relative to the other wires,
we used the Associated Press AM report.
78. Only the Houston Chronicle and Albuquerque Journal (the latter unavailable in
“Academic Universe” and hence not in our sample)-ostensibly due to Reed Morgan’s residence
and local relevance respectively-ran articles that were longer and more detailed.
79. Table One affords an overview of relative emphases in both the Associated Press reports
and subsequent newspaper accounts. It breaks reports of the Liebeck verdict down according to
the information mentioned in each sentence of each report. Rows feature every print report we
were able to locate by “Academic Universe.” The AM and PM reports of the Associated Press are
highlighted for easy contrast with two dozen reports in newspapers. We array fifteen categories of
information in an order determined by coverage. Having coded located articles published on
August 18 or 19 in 1994 for the fifteen categories of information, we rearranged vertical columns
[defined by categories of facts] and horizontal rows [defined by the news organs that published the
articles] to maximize reproducibility. The advantage of a reproducible table is that newspaper
articles range from the ones that covered the greatest number of categories of information [at the
top of the table] to the ones that covered the fewest [“lower” rows of Table One], while the
categories of information are ordered from the categories mentioned in at least one sentence in
every report [the leftmost columns] to categories mentioned in not even one sentence of one
article [the three rightmost columns].
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gether. Scientific testimony about the swiftness with which very hot
liquids inflict sever burns surfaced only in the tenth sentence of the Bergen (NJ) Record and neither in the Associated Press stories nor in stories
in larger, “national” papers. Details about the extent and severity of the
bums or the infirmity they caused were almost completely absent from
the accounts. The Houston Chronicle commented on routine civil justice cases in its thirty-seventh and thirty-ninth sentences; no other source
in Table One so contextualized the Albuquerque anomaly. Not even one
source mentioned the Uniform Commercial Code or the initial inclination of the plaintiff to settle without filing suit or, later, to settle without
trial. All sources avoided characterizing the plaintiff as litigious or
either party as sympathetic.
A third pattern is a bit more complicated. Elements in Table One
correlated with the length (in sentences) of articles. Only three articles
(counting the Associated Press AM report) raised the presence or adequacy of warnings about the temperature of the coffee. About one third
of the reports in Table One devoted one or more sentences to the jurors’
reasoning, despite the quotation from Mr. Anglada in the Associated
Press report. Slightly more papers and both Associated Press reports “placed” the car at the side of the lot or Liebeck in the passenger seat,
and the same number of sources mentioned the intransigence of McDonald’s concerning past complaints and lawsuits. More sources than not
mentioned reactions to the verdict, if only in single sentences in all but
two instances.
These three patterns and other information in Table One reveal
much about Phase One reporting. The four elements invariably covered
– the burns, the awards, the temperature of McDonald’s coffee, and the
spill – also led the other elements in the total number of sentences that
made reference to the element, in the priority (that is, how low the number) of the first mention of the element in the article, and in being part of
headlines. These four offered a succinct, simple sequence: a woman
spills coffee in her lap, sues McDonald’s for making coffee so hot that it
severely burned her, and gets millions. This sequence preserved the perceived irrationality, if not absurdity, of an extravagant award generated
by an everyday occurrence and novel claim.
If those four elements are all that the reader may learn from a story
– and in about half of the newspapers sampled they are all or almost all
of the crucial elements of the story that we found – then newspapers’
reports were not merely fragmentary, as wire stories were, but reductionist. The patterns discussed above and the marginals below Table One
testify to the elements missing from most or many articles and scanted
in most or all: past complaints about and lawsuits against McDonald’s;
[Vol. 56:113
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the impassivity and indifference evident in the testimony of McDonald’s
officials; the lowball offer extended to Ms. Liebeck for her crippling
injuries, extensive rehabilitation, and onerous expenses; the contrasting
mindsets of plaintiff and jurors; the location of the car in the lot and of
Ms. Liebeck in the car; and the presence and usefulness of warnings on
cups. Each element that, by itself, would have made the story less
bizarre – the science of bums; Ms. Liebeck’s initial request for $20,000
in expenses; and the Uniform Commercial Code – eluded almost all
reports.
In sum, Table One shows how newspapers constructed the story of
the McDonald’s Coffee Case to suit newsworthiness at considerable cost
to precision and comprehensiveness. That the initial reports suited the
defense’s Individual Responsibility Narrative far better than the plaintiff’s Defective Products Liability Narrative or the jury’s decision was
an unintended boon for McDonald’s and, we shall see, tort reform in the
public relations battle that followed the case.
PHASE ONE FEATURES AND COMMENTARIES: ENTER THE FACTOIDS
To be sure, wags and pundits might have distorted the coffee case
for partisan, ideological, policy, or satirical purposes no matter how well
spot reports had conveyed the facts. Fragmentary or reductionist reportage, however, left editorialists and commentators free to fill in omissions
with helpful, if incorrect, information. Even if the misinformation that
suffused print media after August 18, 1994 was utterly independent of
fragmentary coverage, the predominance of interpretations built on Ms.
Liebeck’s sole, personal blame for the accident and the utter blamelessness of McDonald’s would have been inevitable. Gaps in public knowledge about the specifics of the case simply made easier the manufacture
of factoids imputing greater moral blame to Ms. Liebeck, the injured.
Features on reactions to the Liebeck verdict, editorials, and letters
to the editor tended to shortchange the most technical information on
which the plaintiffs case depended, thereby divorcing commentators’
views ever further from the case the jurors actually heard. Similarities
between Table One and Table Two reveal how pundits’ emphases
tended to track those of initial reports. Table Two arrays patterns of
emphasis in articles that appeared soon after the verdict but were not
spot reports on the verdict. Since features on reactions, editorials, and
letters to newspapers do not tend to follow the journalistic convention of
putting the most important information first, the relative placement need
not tell us anything, and so Table Two is not scaled.8°
80. Although Phase Two began roughly on September 1, 1994, we have included four
articles that did not take into account the two events that define Phase Two. Those four appear in
20011
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As with the spot reports, bums and monetary awards drew widespread comment, albeit averaging only about two and one-half sentences
per category. The heat of McDonald’s coffee, Ms. Liebeck’s allegation
that its temperature was “too hot,” and the specifics of the spill elicited
even more sentences than information about the injury and award. The
position and immobility of the automobile were still merely a matter for
passing comment. These differences are significant for they display the
alacrity with which the known facts and fact patterns were arrayed
against the plaintiff. Most important, information pertaining to the litigiousness of the plaintiff drew the most sentences of any category, despite
that category’s having elicited not a single mention in spot coverage
(see the column fourth from the right margin in Table One) and despite
the defense’s having presented no evidence that an octogenarian who
had never before sued anyone was trifling with McDonald’s or trying to
pull a fast one.
Spotty coverage left authors free to adopt differing perspectives on
the case’s justifiability and significance and to marshal information to
suit their presuppositions. Two staff writers for the Denver Rocky
Mountain News attempted to allay fears that purchased coffee would
become tepid or that scalding suits would proliferate, two perils predicted far more often than realized. 8 They noted the severity of the
bums and other factors that made the case a poor predictor of things to
come.82 In addition, these two lavished four sentences on past difficulties with hot liquids at McDonald’s and two sentences on whether warnings were adequate. The Chicago Sun-Times ignored facts about
warnings, burn science, or the scaldings that marred the record of the
fast-food chain headquartered nearby, although they did not put Ms.
Liebeck in the driver’s seat or in a moving car.83 The Sun-Times apparently needed no factoids to support its call for jurors to take greater
account of individual responsibility and common sense.
Far more commentators fell back on stereotypes and shibboleths to
accentuate apparent absurdities that had made the case newsworthy. A
brief comment in the San Diego Union-Tribune sounded the tort reform
refrain immediately via the headline “Java Hijack” and gave short shrift
to Ms. Liebeck’s injuries, to her repeatedly spurned efforts to settle for
modest compensation, to the litany of complaints and lawsuits against
McDonald’s, or to inadequate warnings about the dangers of hot
the bottom four rows of Table Two, which assembles articles in chronologically defined rows.
Columns in Table Two are arranged to match columns in Table One for ease of comparison.
81. Bill St. John & Marty Meitus, Despite Lawsuit Brew-haha, Hot Coffee No Burning Issue,
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, Aug. 21, 1994, at 28A.
82. Id.
83. Editorial, Coffee Case Burns Common Sense, CHICAGO SuN-TIMES, Aug. 21, 1994, at 41.
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
liquids.84 The editorial said in its entirety:
When Stella Liebeck fumbled her coffee cup as she rode in the car
with her grandson, she might as well have bought a winning lottery
ticket. The spilled coffee netted her $2.9 million in the form of a jury
award. Liebeck had sued McDonald’s for serving take-out coffee
that her lawyer claimed was too hot. This absurd judgment is a stunning illustration of what is wrong with America’s civil justice system.
Ironically, it also may become a powerful spur to the cause of tort
reform. Our guess is that other greedy copycats in restaurants
throughout America soon will be happily dumping coffee into their
laps in a bid to make a similar killing in the courtroom.85
Amid hyperbole and misstatements, 86 the Union-Tribune mischaracterized the events of the accident. It is untrue that Ms. Liebeck
fumbled her cup “as she rode.”87 Jurors learned she was a passenger in a
parked car. By an interesting coincidence, the Rocky Mountain News
feature committed the same error!”8 Editorial writers for the Arizona
Republic veered into a statement that contradicted their own coverage of
the spot news: Ms. Liebeck “…. tried to open the cup in a moving car
… “. 89 Just days after the verdict, in sum, misinformation began to
alter the story in a manner that inaccurately highlighted the plaintiffs
recklessness. The fact that commentators filled in often inaccurate
details about the “reckless” nature of the accident underscores the inclination to focus on matters of individual responsibility and the opening
left by fragmentary initial reports that emphasized the incongruities
between coffee spilled and millions awarded.
Diana Griego Erwin’s editorial for the San Diego Union-Tribune
recounted the case accurately and without unfair spin, but still imputed
litigiousness to Ms. Liebeck and unfairness to jurors:90
• . . Liebeck also admitted that the plastic foam cup was wedged
between her legs when she pulled off the lid, splashing steaming, hot
84. Editorial, Java Hijack, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE, Aug. 20, 1994, at B6.
85. Id.
86. Of course, plaintiffs hardly “net” jury awards and “winning lottery tickets” usually return
a known amount while post-verdict developments may devour the plaintiff’s “windfall.”
87. On the same date, a feature in the London Times noted that Ms. Liebeck “. . . tried to
drink the coffee while travelling in a car. She wedged the styrofoam cup between her legs in order
to remove it’s lid, whereupon the contents spilt over her lap.” Cafi au Loi, LONDON TIMEs, Aug.
20, 1994.
88. See St. John & Meitus, supra note 81. “Liebeck sustained third-degree burns when she
opened the lid on a cup of McDonald’s coffee while anchoring it between her legs as she rode in a
car.” Id.
89. Editorial, McDonald’s Coffee: Sending the Wrong Message, ARIZONA REPUBLIC, Aug. 22,
1994, at B4.
90. See Diana Griego Erwin, Big Bucks for Dumb Luck? Coffee Is Hot and Life Is Full of
Risks-Deal with It, SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE, Aug. 25, 1994, at B I.
[Vol. 56:113
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java onto her legs, groin and buttocks. She was 79 years old at the
time and received third-degree bums.
Still, hot coffee is generally not intended for direct application to the
legs, groin and buttocks. So why is the fast-food giant at fault here
rather than Liebeck?
I do agree that McDonald’s coffee is too hot, but is this a matter for
the court or the marketplace? 9
Ms. Erwin appears to have missed the fact that the Uniform Commercial Code and other state and national legislation long ago made dangerous products a matter for courts. 92 Perhaps if initial reports had
covered the legal grounds for the plaintiff’s case, Ms. Erwin might have
entertained the notion that McDonald’s should bear some share of the
blame for the bums, rehabilitation, and expenses.
Other commentaries were festooned with misleading factoids.
Talk-show host Mike Rosen excoriated jurors’ decision making while
minimizing the evidence on the basis of which the jurors had decided.93
Amid a welter of presumptions about lawsuit epidemics and what the
economics of litigation would teach, Mr. Rosen acknowledged that Ms.
Liebeck was a passenger but did not say whether the car was in
motion. 94 Skipping over the multitude of complaints about McDonald’s
coffee and the science of bums and mentioning the issue of warnings in
but one sentence, Mr. Rosen then attacked jurors who had issued “(t)he
latest winner in the Stupid Lawsuit Sweepstakes.”9′ 5
Our nation’s suing epidemic may enrich some plaintiffs and their
lawyers, but it all shows up as overhead on society. Perhaps prospective jurors should be required to attend a seminar on the economics of
litigation. Maybe, then, they wouldn’t be so generous. Or better yet:
if a ridiculous award like this is reversed on appeal, how about letting
the defendants sue the jury. [sic] 96
Jurors were not educated in the economics of litigation, but they did
learn about pertinent law. Had news reports similarly instructed Mr.
Rosen, he might not have dismissed the suit out of hand. The same
could be said regarding systematic patterns of personal injury litigation
over recent decades. Regular readers of the news would find precious
little reason for complex, much less skeptical thinking, about the alleged
epidemic of lawsuits and “litigation lottery.”9′ 7
91. Id.
92. See Implied Warranty: Merchantability & Usage of Trade, U.C.C. § 2-314 (1977).
93. Mike Rosen, Coffee and $2.9 Million to Go, DENVER POST, Aug. 26, 1994, at B11.
94. Id.
95. Id.
96. Id.
97. See Aks, Bloom, Haltom, & McCann, Hegemonic Tales and Subversive Statistics, supra
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
The champion at misstating the case and, to some extent, harbinger
of conventional beliefs to come was Dave Rossie. As Table Two
reveals, Mr. Rossie’s August 28, 1994 column in the Denver Post passed
over lawsuits and complaints about McDonald’s coffee, the science of
bums, and warnings, all of which were integral to the products-liability
case advanced by the plaintiff.98 He then compounded these sins of
omission with sins of commission. He began his commentary with the
hackneyed non sequitur that the Liebeck decision proved that the United
States was the most litigious society on the planet, 99 and then accused
the Associated Press of having excluded inconvenient details. 00 Mr.
Rossie supplemented those details with convenient factoids. He noted
that the Associated Press report set Ms. Liebeck’s hospital bills at nearly
$10,000, “which suggests she may have been seen by more than one
physician in the emergency room.”” Although the Associated Press
story on which Mr. Rossie relied stated that Ms. Liebeck had endured
third-degree bums, it did not state how much of her body was burned so
severely. 10 2 Nor did the Associated Press mention her skin grafts or
week in the hospital, during each of which more than one physician
undoubtedly saw her. ‘ 03 What the quoted language is supposed to insinuate is not clear to us, but Mr. Rossie may have understated the injuries
and rehabilitation due to the Associated Press’s abbreviated coverage.
Mr. Rossie then careened into outright error: “It was brought out in
the trial that McDonald’s heats its coffee to between 165 and 170
degrees.”‘” Actually, both Associated Press stories noted that the
McDonald’s deliberately served its coffee at 180 degrees or more, a
standard that, jurors had learned, was explicitly demanded in McDonnote 12. See generally Galanter, Tort Panic, supra note 18; Galanter, News From Nowhere, supra
note 18; Galanter, Reading the Landscape, supra note 18.
98. See Dave Rossie, How About a Hot Cup of Coffee?, DENVER POST, Aug. 28, 1994, at G5.
99. Id. “Anyone who doubts that we are the most litigious society on Earth should consider
the case of Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, N. M.” Id. Every scholar who has looked at the matter
realizes how problematic claims of American litigiousness are. See generally Richard A. Posner,
Explaining the Variance in the Number of Tort Suits Across U.S. States and Between the United
States and England, 26 J. LEGAL STUDIES 477 (1997). Even if the litigiousness of Americans
were established, we cannot imagine how that proposition would bear any necessary relation to
the Liebeck case.
100. Rossie, supra note 98, at 65. To be fairer to Mr. Rossie than he was to the Associated
Press, he was correct to note the omission. Somewhat curiously, the shorter evening Associated
Press report did convey the information that the longer morning wire story did not.
101. Id.
102. The longer Associated Press report from the AM cycle did not state that Ms. Liebeck had
held the coffee in her lap, but the shorter PM cycle report did. Thus, we assume that Mr. Rossie
was drawing exclusively from the earlier, longer report. See AP, Woman Burned, supra note 3.
103. See id.
104. Rossie, supra note 98, at G5. Mr. Rossie did include facts comparing such a range to the
much lower temperatures of home-brewing machines.
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ald’s manuals. The lower range was the plaintiff’s estimate of the temperature when Ms. Liebeck opened the lid about four minutes after
buying the coffee. Had Mr. Rossie understood that Chris Tiano had
stopped the car after leaving the window and only then had Ms. Liebeck
uncapped the cup, he might have noted that the car was not moving.
Instead, he like so many others merely noted that Ms. Liebeck was a
passenger in a car driven by her grandson but did not situate the car at
the time of the spill.”°5 But then, the Associated Press had not supplied
those details.
Mr. Rossie then explained the award as follows:
Ms. Liebeck’s lawyers figured out that McDonald’s sells $1.34 million worth of coffee a day, and decided that their client was entitled
to two days’ worth of coffee sales revenues to compensate for her
pain and suffering and hospital [sic] bills, not to mention their
fees. 106
The reference to lawyers’ fees was as clever as snide, but by this
point the pundit could no longer blame Associated Press for the misinformation or disinformation that supported his tirade. The Associated
Press had informed Mr. Rossie that the $2.68 million award was to punish McDonald’s for its callousness and to dissuade it from continuing its
reckless ways, not to compensate Ms. Liebeck for pain, suffering, and
bills. If Mr. Rossie could blame his freewheeling in the absence of facts
on the omissions of the Associated Press, he here was contradicting his
own source to manufacture factoids convenient for his presuppositions
and attitudes.
Having misstated matters to slander the lawyers, Mr. Rossie then
slandered civil jurors in general “. . . more often than not, when confronted by a giant, [sic] corporation of uncounted wealth on the one
hand and the lone individual, especially a little old lady, on the other, the
jury is going to come down on the side of the individual.”” 0 7 Leaving to
the side the absence of authority for Mr. Rossie’s “calculation” – pundits’ license, let us agree – and presuming that Mr. Rossie was unaware
that scholarly investigations of jurors’ sentiments and reasoning refuted
his generalization, 0 8 he adduced exactly no evidence to show that the
Albuquerque jurors had merely punished the deep-pocketed fast-food
corporation. Mr. Rossie concluded that the Liebeck case “. . . should
never have gone to trial. The judge should have tossed it before the first
105. Id.
106. Id.
107. Id.
108. The consistent evidence against Mr. Rossie’s generalization is reviewed in VALERIE
HANS, BUSINESS ON TRIAL: THE CIVIL JURY & CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY (2000).
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May it please the court. [sic]”‘ °9 Had the Associated Press provided a
more complete account or had Mr. Rossie researched the case, he might
have discovered the latent truth of his first sentiment: the case should
never have gone to trial because McDonald’s had multiple opportunities
to settle. His second sentence is based on profound ignorance of the
facts and law that constituted the case but encouraged by selective news
coverage.
To summarize: spot coverage of Phase One featured few outright
errors, but commentators compensated for omitted information by faulty
inference and invention. In such a manner concise, fragmentary coverage fostered a flood of factoids and derisive spin about the accident,
which quickly morphed into a fashionable fable about a civil legal system gone awry and the triumph of a predatory plaintiff and litigious
lawyer.
PHASE Two COVERAGE IN NEWSPAPERS: SECOND CHANCES FOR
LITIGANTS AND JOURNALISTS
On September 1, 1994, two developments might have changed the
evolving story of Stella Liebeck. First, trial judge Robert Scott directed
the parties towards a mediator.11 ° Second, a front-page article in the
Wall Street Journal revealed much about Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants that had been obscured in or omitted from early coverage.”1
These two events define a second stage in the Liebeck litigation.
MEDIATION – A NON-STORY
The directed mediation made little difference to knowledge about
the Liebeck case because, that we have found, only the Associated Press
and the Chicago Sun-Times carried the story. As Table Three (see under
“Phase Two”) displays, this pair of stories provides only the sketchiest
indication of how coverage of the Liebeck story might have evolved
between August 18, 1994 and September 1, 1994. The attention-grabbing jury award, the severe bums, and the ill-advised actions of Ms.
Liebeck were as prominent in this duo of spot reports as in the first wave
of coverage. Both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Associated Press
reported reactions and the circumstances of the accident, just as they had
in August.” 12 Each allotted a sentence to the civil justice system, con109. Rossie, supra note 98, at G5.
110. Liebeck Record, supra note 21.
111. Andrea Gerlin, A Matter of Degree, WALL ST. J., Sept. 1, 1994, at Al.
112. Associated Press, Mediator Gets Hot Coffee Case, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Sept. 2, 1994, at
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
trary to their initial reports. 11 3
If this pair of spot reports tells us little about reportage of post-trial
developments, it nonetheless makes the point that omissions undermined
dissemination of the case that the jurors witnessed. Ms. Liebeck’s contention that the McDonald’s coffee was too hot was mentioned by the
Associated Press, albeit in fewer sentences and far later in its report than
in its Phase One story.” 4 The Chicago Sun-Times omitted these items,
which were crucial to Ms. Liebeck’s case.1 15 Past complaints and
actions by McDonald’s, which drew two to three sentences from the
wires and Sun-Times in August, elicited no coverage in the later spots.
Skimpier reports made for an even more fragmented story.
Perhaps the omission of greater moment was the lack of any coverage whatsoever in any of the other twenty-five papers that covered the
verdict.11 6 This omission is not merely a matter of concern for scholars
who expect more of the news.” 7 Non-coverage of post-trial events
facilitated misconceptions. It not only failed to educate but misled.
When editorialists argued as if the McDonald’s Coffee Case ended in the
Albuquerque courtroom on August 18 and letter writers seemed unaware
that punitive damages are commonly reduced by trial judges or appellate
judges or both, both may have been relying on spot reports that treated
civil judgments as faits accomplis.
Omissions were exacerbated by a familiar error in the Associated
Press account. 11 8 The third sentence of the Associated Press story read
in full: “Stella Liebeck, then 79, received third-degree burns on her
legs, groin and buttocks in 1992 when she placed a cup of coffee
between her legs at the drive-up window to steady it while prying the lid
off. ” 9 This sentence once more misstates facts presented to the jury.
That Ms. Liebeck and her grandson took the precaution of moving the
car away from the window and stopping the car before Ms. Liebeck
113. Id.
114. Jurors Sting McDonald’s for Scalding Coffee, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 19, 1994.
115. $2.9 Million Award Scalds McDonald’s, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Aug. 19, 1994, at 2.
116. See, e.g., Woman Wins Lawsuit, FT. LAUD. SUN SENT., Aug. 19, 1994, at 3A; A Woman
Who Was Scalded When Her McDonald’s Coffee Spilled Won a Jury Award of Nearly $2.9
Million – or About Two Days’ Coffee Sales for the Fast Food Chain, ST PETE. TIMES, Aug. 19,
1994, at 6A; Scalding Coffee Nets $2.9 Million, PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE, Aug. 19, 1994, at
A7; News & Abstracts, WASHINGTON POST, Aug. 19, 1994, at C 1; Coffee Spill Burns Woman, Jury
Awards $2.9 Million, WALL ST. J., Aug. 19, 1994, at B3; McBurn Earns Woman Millions Drive
Burned by Coffee That Was Too Hot, Judge Rules, TORONTO STAR, Aug. 19, 1994, at Al; Coffee
Too Hot, Jury Finds, TORONTO SUN, Aug. 19, 1994, at 67; Woman Burned by Coffee Wins $2.9
Million Award, ORLANDO SENT., Aug. 19, 1994, at A16; Big Jury Award for Coffee Burn, N.Y.
TIMES, Aug. 19, 1994, at D5; McDonald’s Scalding, BOSTON HERALD, Aug. 19, 1994, at 30.
117. See HALTOM, supra note 67, at 201.
118. See Associated Press, Judge Orders Conference in Spilled Coffee Award, Sept. 1, 1994.
119. Id. (emphasis added).
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fidgeted with the lid may have suggested to jurors that Ms. Liebeck and
Mr. Tiano were not as negligent as the Associated Press report might
imply. As if that were not enough misstatement, the account obliterates
Ms. Liebeck’s estimate that she attempted to add cream and sugar within
about four minutes of the coffee’s being poured.’ 20 Such interjected
facts about the accident again suggest an inclination to direct focus
towards the (alleged) recklessness of the spill, while distracting attention
from the danger of the product that unexpectedly caused the severe
injuries.
REMEDIATION – THE REST OF THE STORY REACHES FEW READERS
Another stimulus, Andrea Gerlin’s investigation of the Liebeck case
as jurors saw it,’ 2I had enormous potential for broadening and deepening
understanding of the Liebeck case and verdict. Ms. Gerlin explained in
the Wall Street Journal how jurors could have reached judgments that
pundits and wags had ridiculed and editorialists had pronounced absurd
or stupid. 22 She found it easier to understand, if not agree with, the jury
once she learned about major facts and legal arguments that had shaped
their reasoning.123 Gerlin recounted McDonald’s longstanding and
extensive record of scalding its customers. 24 She reviewed testimony
from McDonald’s officials and experts that made the corporation appear
nonchalant and even callous. 25 She reported on the severity of the
bums, on the impact that photographs of Ms. Liebeck’s injuries had had
on jurors, and on some scientific evidence regarding the celerity of
bums. ”
‘
26 Ms. Gerlin discovered reasons for sympathizing with Ms.
Liebeck, reasons that had hitherto received but the shortest shrift.
To be sure, Ms. Gerlin’s piece shortchanged some aspects of the
case. Nowhere did she inform readers that the grandson was driving or
that the car was parked away from the window. She also skimped on
how the science of bums suggested the urgency of reducing the temperature of hot liquids, on the legal basis for the judgment, and on the long
history of the dispute prior to trial. But, overall, the account was complex, rich, and well researched.
Despite the excellence of Ms. Gerlin’s report, any potential for at
least some increased understanding about the case was not impressively
realized. Only seven additional news sources (of the original twenty120. See id.
121. Andrea Gerlin, A Matter of Degree, WALL ST. J., Sept. 1, 1994, at Al.
122. Id.
123. See id.
124. Id. at A4.
125. Id.
126. Id. at AI, A4.
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
six) produced articles that wholly or largely reprinted Gerlin’s Wall
Street Journal report. Ms. Gerlin’s follow-up and articles based on it
complemented Phase One coverage. As in the earlier phase, facts about
bums, monetary awards, the heat and defects of McDonald’s coffee, and
the nature of the spill were amply highlighted. In addition to these
staples of spot-coverage, though, the follow-ups to Gerlin did devote
attention to the record of McDonald’s: past scaldings, complaints, and
litigation; resistance and recalcitrance; and flaunting and flouting of
standards for coffee in the fast-food industry. These facts cast the defendant in a less flattering light and made the awarding of punitive damages
more understandable than it had been when first covered. Relatively
sympathetic attention to the case as understood by jurors and plaintiff
made this second phase of coverage quite different from the first.
Of course, even papers that relayed Ms. Gerlin’s addenda need not
have updated their views to take the newly available information into
account. The Cincinnati Enquirer included much of the same enlightening information as the other articles, but the editorial interjected three
sentences alleging Ms. Liebeck’s undue litigiousness, which was decidedly not a theme explored by Ms. Gerlin.127 Having observed that many
jackpot jury awards were reversed or reduced on appeal, the editorial
continued: “Unfortunately, cases like these have destroyed the credibility of the justice system, giving Americans a picture of bone-headed
jurors giving away millions for cuts and scrapes at the demand of greedy
gold-diggers and their ambulance-chasing lawyers.” 128 In other words,
after admitting the myriad ways in which the Liebeck dispute refuted
popular prejudices about civil justice cases, the Enquirer then reconstituted this exception as evidence for the “rule” that civil justice is not
credible, that jurors are gulls, that plaintiffs are chiselers, and that plaintiff’s counsel are shysters. Not content to have reiterated a passel of
stereotypes in an editorial that itself demonstrated that those cliches did
not fairly apply to the Liebeck litigation, the Enquirer then drew the
dramatic moral lesson: “Personal responsibility has been scrapped for
the notion that someone can be made to pay for any mistake – including opening a cup of hot coffee between your legs while driving.”‘ 129
Tort reformers could not have articulated the theme of individual
responsibility at the heart of their legal argument any better! ‘ 30 Not only
127. Spilled Coffee: The Rest of the Story About McDonald’s $3 Million Claim, CINCINNATI
ENQUIRER, Sept. 6, 1994, at A6.
128. Id.
129. Id.
130. By the end of the editorial, the Enquirer blames defense counsel for the loss of the case.
Id. In an editorial pertaining to personal responsibility, the McDonald’s Corporation emerges as
the only courtroom participant not blameworthy in the Enquirer’s view.
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did the Enquirer relay Ms. Gerlin’s corrections only to supplant them
with common charges inapposite to the immediate dispute, but the editorial exploited Ms. Gerlin’s (and her predecessors’) omissions by providing inaccurate information about the automobile’s location, stationary
status, and actual driver.13′ The perils of omissions and the persistence
of factoids could not be clearer.
Why does Gerlin’s correction appear to have made so little difference? Cynics might generalize Pundit Rossie’s contention that the
Associated Press dislikes to be reminded of its omissions; dailies choose
not to emphasize shortcomings and superficiality in their coverage. 132
Having missed crucial details in the first place, most papers seem to
have been averse to revisit a matter no longer timely. Absent the factual
update, commentators were left to fill in missing details as suited their
moralistic spin. When journalistic omissions and commissions meet in a
mutually reinforcing peak, erroneous factoids result and familiar story
lines (here echoing tort reformers) find implicit support.
PHASE THREE COVERAGE IN NEWSPAPERS: MORE
OMISSIONS AND MORE FACTOIDS
Whatever the explanation of press reticence about Ms. Gerlin’s
investigations in Phase Two, in Phase Three the press compounded its
indifference to key points that proved pivotal to the plaintiff’s successful
story before the jury. When Judge Scott inaugurated Phase Three by
reducing the punitive damages by over eighty percent to three times the
compensatory damages, the press had an opportunity to correct details
and educate the public about how the civil legal system routinely works.
As Table Three (please look under “Phase Three”) summarizes, we have
been able to document few reports that took advantage of that opportunity. Crucial omissions persisted and errors of commission proliferated.
SPOT OMISSIONS CONTINUE AND A SPOT FACTOID ERUPTS
We were not surprised that 37.5% fewer newspapers covered the
reduction of punitive damages than covered the original award. We
found two wire-service stories but only fifteen spot reports in newspapers, two of them in the Chicago Sun-Times. 133 The verdict having
131. Id.
132. Our interviews with journalists confirmed this point quite emphatically, especially
regarding trying to “make up” for earlier omissions.
133. See, e.g., Judge Reduces Award in Coffee Scalding Case, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, Sept. 14,
1994, at 2; Hot Issue, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Sept. 14, 1994, at 3; Judge Reduces Award Against
McDonald’s, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 15, 1994, at 1; McDonald’s Coffee Award Reduced 75%
by Judge, WALL ST. J., Sept. 15, 1994, at A4; Judge Chills Jury Award to Woman in Coffee Spill,
TORONTO STAR, Sept. 15, 1994, at A3; Judge Lowers Settlement, FT. LAUD. SUN. SENT., Sept. 15,
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
become nearly month-old news, this waning of interest was predictable.
Nonetheless, reduction of coverage exacerbated the original holler of the
dollar. If even diligent readers ran across no story of the reduction in
punitive damages, they became more likely to remember the outlandish
award. Therefore, it is little wonder that even well-informed commentators apparently missed the reduction. This understandable omission conformed the story to news framing but deformed the legal frame that the
jury had accepted.
While the scaled information items for Phase Three did not precisely reiterate the order in earlier phases rank-order correlations
between the four phases were high.’34 Information on the monetary
award and burn injury predictably switched places between Phase One
and Phase Three, with the reduced punitive damages now dominating,
but both elements were ubiquitous as they had been in the first set of
spot reports, while facts pertaining to the spill were omitted from only
two newspapers.’ 35 It seems unsurprising that the disputants’ reactions
were covered by a greater proportion of papers in Phase Three than in
earlier phases – reactions were easier to come by a month after the
original verdict. Facts about McDonald’s past conduct and the location
of the automobile were about as prominent in the September reports as
in the August reports. Although information pertaining to the heat of the
coffee or allegations about its dangers were postponed in a slight majority of the papers and omitted entirely from six papers, when addressed,
these themes consumed more sentences than many other categories.
Three newspapers conveyed information about the jury or jurors, a drop
from initial coverage. 1
36
The variety of information types discussed declined even further
between Phase One and Phase Three. Six categories of information
drew no mentions whatsoever in any paper. The Associated Press’s sin
of commission continued in the newspapers as well. Following the AM
and PM Associated Press reports that Ms. Liebeck tried to open her cof1994, at 3D; John Taylor, Coffee to Return to Popeye’s Menu, OMAHA WORLD HERALD, Sept. 15,
1994, at 15; Judge Cuts Award in Scalding-Coffee Suit to $640,000, L.A. TIMES, Sept. 15, 1994, at
D2; Court Cuts Scalding Award, FINANCIAL TIMES, Sept. 15, 1994, at 1; Judge Lowers Coffee
Award to $480,000 McDonald’s Should Only Pay Reasonably Related Damages, DALLAS
MORNING NEWS, Sept. 15, 1994, at ID; Sue Major Holmes, Judge Cuts McDonald Coffee
Damages, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Sept. 15, 1994, at 6; N.M. McDonald’s Penalty Reduced,
BALTIMORE SUN, Sept. 15, 1994, at 18C.
134. Between Phase One and Phase Three, for example, Spearman’s p = 0.906.
135. See Judge Lowers Coffee Award to $480,000 McDonald’s Should Only Pay Reasonably
Related Damages, DALLAS MORNING NEWS, Sept. 15, 1994, at ID; John Taylor, Coffee to Return
to Popeye’s Menu, OMAHA WORLD HERALD, Sept. 15, 1994, at 15.
136. John Taylor, Coffee to Return to Popeye’s Menu, OMAHA WORLD HERALD, Sept. 15,
1994, at 15.
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“1137 fee “at a McDonald’s driveup window …. , seven of the nine newspaper spot reports provided misleading information about the location or
mobility of the automobile, again underlining the assumption that
Liebeck’s spill was reckless. This is relevant, for the earliest reports in
Phase One had often left unexamined the position of the car and its
immobility. For all the corrections afforded by Ms. Gerlin’s report, the
whereabouts of the car when the spill occurred was not accurately identified. 138 With the Associated Press stories of September 1 and September 14, omissions and ambiguities began to give way to interjected
errors, and those errors began to fly-speck spot reports that tracked the
Associated Press. 13 9 Even more important, critical omissions about facts
and frames presented at trial remained and enticed readers to fill in omitted details with convenient factoids again inaccurately implying Ms.
Liebeck’s recklessness as cause for her injuries.
FEATURES: OMISSIONS AND FACTOIDS APLENTY
Commentaries and editorials during Phase Three increased the distance of the news story from the account heard by the jury. For example, errors about the location and mobility of the Ford Probe dotted
editorials and features during Phase Three. The nine articles that we
located for the period from September 15, 1994 through December 1,
1994 tended to track spot coverage, which we have seen to be in error.
The nature of the awards and the burns as well as select items regarding
the accident still fueled articles. We found greater attention to the
record of McDonald’s corporation than we might have expected, but we
note that some of the attention followed from repetition of an editorial
written by a partially informed high school student1 40 and two-thirds of
the sentences that referred to the McDonald’s record came from an editorial relaying Ms. Gerlin’s follow-up. For the most part, these few articles reveal a fading of intensity as Ms. Liebeck became less topical and
more familiar.
Six of the nine editorials and letters once again made some reference to the drive-up window. Of those six, two editorials (from the Ari137. Sue Major Holmes, Judge Reduces Award in Coffee Scalding Case, ASSOCIATED PRESS,
Sept. 14, 1994, AM cycle and PM cycle.
138. The report of the reduction in the Wall Street Journal does not speak to location or
mobility of the automobile. See McDonald’s Coffee Award Reduced 75% by Judge, WALL ST. J.,
Sept. 15, 1994, at A4.
139. See, e.g., Judge Cuts McDonald’s Coffee Damages, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Sept. 15, 1994,
at 6 (claims Liebeck “tried to pry lid off at McDonald’s drive-through”); Judge Lowers Settlement,
FT. LAUD. SUN. SENT., Sept. 15, 1994, at 3D (Liebeck allegedly “tried to pry off its lid at
McDonald’s drive-up window”).
140. Mili Vakil, Merchants Shouldn’t Take Heat for Dumb Act, CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER,
Oct. 10, 1994, at 2E [hereinafter Vakil, Dumb Act].
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zona Republic, an editorial incorporating parts of the Gerlin article, and
Washington Times) did not suggest that Ms. Liebeck had fumbled her
coffee at the drive-through window. 4 ‘ Other comments were wildly
inaccurate. The Greensboro News and Record accurately placed the
plaintiff in the passenger’s seat but distorted the locale of the accident:
“Liebeck, who had put the cup of coffee between her legs while riding
through the drive-thru, spilled it on her lap when she tried to pry off the
lid.”‘ 42 A Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial (written by the aforementioned high school student) made a similar error.’4 3 In addition, five of
the nine articles linked the case to excessive litigiousness, with the Providence Journal-Bulletin devoting numerous sentences to the charge. 44
Meanwhile, none of the commentaries expressed sympathy or support
for Ms. Liebeck.
PHASE FOUR: THE CASE SETTLES AND THE LEGEND IS SET
On November 30, 1994, McDonald’s settled with Ms. Liebeck for
an undisclosed sum. Spot coverage about the end of the formal dispute
marked a fourth phase and completed the story for most reporters. We
located sixteen spot reports in fourteen newspapers most on December
2, 1994. After news of the settlement, Ms. Liebeck’s matter surfaced in
few articles for the remainder of 1994. Phase Four, then, represents a
denouement of reportage, after which the case largely yielded to widespread factoids.
In Phase Four, omissions increased again as spot coverage crystallized for a last time. Only the characteristics of Ms. Liebeck’s injuries “made” every report in Phase Four. Every other element was omitted
from at least two reports. The dollar continued to holler even as Ms.
Liebeck’s “jackpot” shrank, perhaps because agreement on money
resolved the dispute. Even coverage regarding the award was somewhat
mixed: the only relevant headlines we found referred to injuries rather
than money. Having hollered dollar awards to accentuate the absurdity
of millions for an everyday mishap (and to increase the news-value of
the report), print media now alluded to how little Ms. Liebeck and her
attorneys may have gotten, mainly because the agreement was sealed at
the request of McDonald’s. Papers lost the hype of the hollered dollar
but could not provide an alternative to the gaudy figure of initial reports.
141. See Editorial, Put a Limit on Medical Liability Awards?, WASHINGTON TIMES, Oct. 2,
1994.
142. Leigh Pressley, Great Gobblers!, 1994 Turkeys of the Year, GREENSBORO NEWS AND
RECORD, Nov. 24, 1994, at DI.
143. Vakil, Dumb Act, supra note 140.
144. John Martin, ABC Takes Aim at the “Blame Game”, PROVIDENCE JOURNAL-BULLETIN,
Oct. 26, 1994, at 5E.
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As a result, editorialists and commentators continue to use wildly
inflated figures for Ms. Liebeck’s award.
Selected information pertaining to the accident itself persisted as a
common reference, as did descriptions about the placement and mobility
of the automobile, sustaining focus on the accident rather than the product. Beyond those four sorts of information, reporting was skimpy. The
plaintiff’s claim that McDonald’s coffee was so torrid that it was a
defective product appeared in less than a third of the articles.145 Again,
the four evidentiary claims central to the plaintiffs winning legal construction at trial did not surface at all. The history and current posture of
McDonald’s corporation graced only the article in the Wall Street Journal, which alone recalled an aspect of the dispute trumpeted by the Gerlin investigation.’ 46 The claim that Ms. Liebeck spilled her coffee at the
drive-through window persisted three months after the Associated Press
introduced the error. That error surfaced in eight of nine news organs
that referred to location.’47 Only the earlier report in the Chicago Sun
Times omitted a reference that conveyed incorrect information. 48
PHASE FIVE BEGINS: MCDONALD’S LOST THE BATTLE BUT
LIEBECK LOST THE WAR
The end of 1994 defines a cusp between the first four phases of the
Liebeck story and the extended fifth stage that began with the settlement
and continues today. We located but four references in 1994 to the
Liebeck case after spot reports of the settlement, all four the same commentary.’ 49 Scott Montgomery’s discourse on blame-avoidance was
carried by four newspapers in our “Academic Universe” sample.
Approximately 114 of Mr. Montgomery’s sixteen hundred words pertained to the McDonald’s Coffee Case. 50 Recalling earlier editorials,
Mr. Montgomery emphasized Ms. Liebeck’s responsibility for the spill
145. For one example, see McDonald’s Reaches Settlement in Coffee Burn Suit, L.A. TIMES,
Dec. 3, 1994, at D2.
146. McDonald’s Settles Lawsuit Over Burn From Coffee, WALL ST. J., Dec. 2, 1994, at B6.
147. Examples include: McDonald’s Hot Coffee Settlement, KANSAS CITY STAR, Dec. 3, 1994,
at B2; McDonald’s Reaches Settlement in Coffee Burn Suit, L.A. TIMES, Dec. 3, 1994, at D2;
McDonald’s Corp. has Reached Out-of-Court Settlement, TORONTO SUN, Dec. 2, 1994, at A23;
Hot Coffee, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Dec. 2, 1994, at 56; Hot Coffee Settlement, NEWSDAY, Dec. 2,
1994, at A26; Coffee Suit, USA TODAY, Dec. 2, 1994, at 3A.
148. Hot Coffee, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Dec. 2, 1994, at 56.
149. There were references to the case that even our expansive search in “Academic Universe”
did not turn up. See, e.g., Jeff Pelline, Excuses, Excuses-Sun Gets in the Eyes of Corporate
America, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, Dec. 29, 1994, at Dl. In pursuit of replicability, we did not
add such articles to the data set.
150. Scott Montgomery, Lay Blame: It Is the Name of the Game, SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE, Dec.
18, 1994, at Ft.
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
and the lamentable litigiousness that her case represented.1″5′
As was the case in commentaries during the third phase, the
Liebeck matter had been distilled in editorials, features, and comments to
a very shallow account. This account related briefly elements indispensable for identifying the case: hollering dollars, painful burned skin, spilt
coffee, and reaction from McDonald’s corporation or counsel. The
overwhelming focus of the treatment, however, was on Ms. Liebeck’s
failure to take personal responsibility for her clumsiness and her litigious
inclinations towards blaming her misfortune on a well-heeled corporation. In short, by the start of Phase Five, the Individual Responsibility
Narrative favored by defendant McDonald’s had obliterated the Defective Products Liability Narrative that had motivated the plaintiff and
persuaded the jury. To be certain, given its ideological pull in our society, the invocation of “individual responsibility” against the plaintiff’s
greed, adversarialism, and rights obsession might have triumphed anyway. Emphasis on elements and interpretations that redounded to the
benefit of the defendant, and, far more important, omission of information and arguments crucial to the plaintiff’s case certainly Helped that
triumph, however. Omissions from otherwise solid spot coverage in
effect disguised and distorted the actual claims produced by Ms. Liebeck
and assessed favorably by the jury and trial judge. We should not wonder, then, that “the McDonald’s Coffee Lady” became a symbol for
undeserved victory in the litigation lottery. 152
Indeed, throughout subsequent years, newspaper references to the
incident were common if widely variable in type (editorial, letter to editor, advice column, humor column, etc.) and location. Not only was the
Liebeck case often recalled, but disputes over hot liquids in other settings increasingly received attention in the news.’53 Moreover, invocations of Stella’s saga proliferated in commentaries, with inaccuracies
increasing in proportion to self-righteous moralizing. Closing out the
year, Jeff Pelline wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that “America
has a victim complex,” as witnessed by “such surreal cases as the
woman who recently won a $2.7 million verdict after spilling coffee on
her leg in a McDonald’s restaurant.”‘5 4 A few months later, a New York
151. See id.
152. Please notice that we do not claim that fidelity to narratives was either necessary or
sufficient for the “iconization” of Stella Liebeck. Rather, we argue that: (1) print media
disseminated factoids and fantasies into the public forum while interpreters in an array of media
were defining the case for themselves and for their audiences; and (2) the absence of
countervailing facts freed interpreters to insinuate further factoids and moral fantasies into
convenient places.
153. See examples cited in Greenlee, Kramer v. Java World, supra note 6, at 723-24 n.57.
154. Pelline, supra note 149.
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Times editorial similarly invoked Stella Liebeck as a symbol for a society run off of its tracks. “[L]ife… used to be blissfully simple: the coffee hot, the drinker sitting and sipping. But now everyone’s hither and
yon, perching take-out coffee in mid-dash. And spilling it. And suing
someone.”1’55 Around the same time, an editorial in the Oakland Tribune began by making our own point quite concisely, for a different purpose: “There is probably one in the paper today, if you take the time to
look. There usually is: A numbing tale of a citizen hauling someone into
court over something absurd…,”156 This rant continued:
The poster woman for this sort of ludicrous lawsuit is an 81 year old
New Mexico woman who sued McDonald’s after she spilled her hot
McDonald’s coffee in her lap… Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind
that our legal system is being badly abused? Greedy lawyers, victims
out to make a buck, and a culture that encourages people to sue
instead of accepting their own responsibility or working things out,
have clogged with cases that don’t belong there.157
Humorist Dave Barry included inaccurate references to the hot coffee judgment on his list of major reasons for wonder about American
society at the start of 1995; the former labeled his retrospective essay “A
Great Year for Victims.’ 58 Columnist Joseph Perkins of the San Diego
Union-Tribune even named an annual award “The Stellas.”‘ 59 “The
award is named for Stella Liebeck, the Albuquerque, N.M. woman who
became an instant millionaire and American icon after spilling a cup of
McDonald’s coffee in her lap and winning a judgment against the fastfood chain.”16 Ann Landers added the dispute to her own columns regularly dispensing “common sense” about moral responsibility to the
American public.’ 6′ An angry reader was quoted as saying about Ms.
Liebeck that “…. she was a malingering old biddy who pumped up her
alleged injuries to get more money… (F)ar from being a victory for the
consumer, this case merely encourages unethical, greedy lawyers and
their greedy clients to continue to perpetuate such frauds on gullible
juries. .. “162
155. OUTLOOK 1995: THE ECONOMY-Highlights-A Simple Pleasure, Made
Complicated, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 3, 1995, at C3.
156. Editorial, A Nation of Lawyers, OAKLAND TRIBUNE, May 5, 1995, at A14.
157. Id.
158. Dave Barry, A Great Year for Victims, DALLAS MORNING NEWS, Jan. 1, 1995, at 2F.
159. Joseph Perkins, The Year’s Best Examples of Strange or Wild Lawsuits, ROCKY
MOUNTAIN NEWS, Dec. 23, 1997, at 45A [hereinafter Perkins, Stella Awards 1997]; Joseph
Perkins, The Year’s Most Outlandish Lawsuits, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, Dec. 22, 1996, at 60A.
160. Perkins, Stella Awards, 1997, supra note 159.
161. See Ann Landers, McLawsuit Plaintiffs Should Wake Up & Smell the Coffee, FRESNO
BEE, Oct. 6, 1995, at F2.
162. Id.
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The legend of Stella has lived on in newspapers until the present.
Spot news coverage of lawsuits for excessively hot liquids or pickles on
hamburgers and a chicken head among the new fried chicken wings at
McDonald’s provide one form of enduring reference keeping memory of
the original case and what it represented alive.1 63 The case lives in
many other forms as well. For example, on Sunday, January 2, 2000, the
front page of the New York Times “Arts and Leisure” section featured a
long article in which comic Steve Martin ruminated about his dilemma
of just “exactly what to celebrate on December 31, 199 9 .”I 6 Martin’s
witty meditation, titled “The Third Millennium: So Far, So Good,”
began with a “A Short History of Thought” in which the author urged
readers to “. . . think of poor Socrates, with his simple answer to the
question ‘What is justice?’ There was no way for him to have foreseen a
jury’s $3 million payout to a McDonald’s customer who spilled a cup of
too-hot coffee in her lap.”1’65 Martin’s joke turned on the absurdity that
the legal damages awarded to octogenarian Stella Liebeck in 1994 for
injuries resulting from an everyday occurrence represented 2500 years
of human progress in thinking about justice. 66 The wry juxtaposition
worked, of course, only to the extent that Martin’s reference to the jury
verdict 167 over five years earlier still resonated clearly among readers of
the Times.
One feature of Phase Five coverage is especially notable if, by this
point, unsurprising. Whereas quoted reactions regarding the judgment
in the first four phases were dominated by those sympathetic to the winning plaintiff (Liebeck’s attorney, juror, etc.), by Phase Five, cited
authorities and experts were critical of the judgment and/or Ms. Liebeck
by more than a two-to-one margin. 68
BLAMING THE VICTIM: Ms. LIEBECK IN POPULAR CULTURE
The transformation of the scalding coffee case into a classic tort
tale and Stella Liebeck into the poster lady for the tort reform movement
163. See, e.g., Chicken McNoggin, Hold the Fries, WASH. POST, Dec. 1, 2000, at CI; see also
Greenlee, Kramer v. Java World, supra note 6.
164. Steve Martin, The Third Millennium: So Far, So Good, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 2, 2000, §2 at 1,
8.
165. Id. at 1.
166. See id.
167. Mr. Martin may have relied on the phrase “$3 million payout” to prompt readers’
recollections or he may have believed that a jury did or could compel McDonald’s to send three
million dollars to the customer. In either event, Mr. Martin is inaccurate for reasons detailed in
this article.
168. McDonald’s attorneys and spokespersons opted to offer little comment after the jury’s
judgment, while Liebeck’s supporters were happy to claim victory. After the dispute was settled,
the legend drew heavy fire. The data derived from a study of five top newspapers in 1995-1998.
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burgeoned outside newspapers. Indeed, the diffusion of the inverted,
factoid-riddled morality tale throughout the electronic media, popular
culture, and political discourse was so rapid, dramatic, and sustained that
every reader of this sentence must be familiar with some invocation of
the icon that Stella Liebeck has become. We briefly catalogue just some
of the venues in which the story was replicated, usually in derisively
cartoonish terms. In doing so, we not only elaborate on the dissemination of the McDonald’s coffee chronicle, but we demonstrate through
the case study the ways that representations by print media and other
media of popular culture are continuously interrelated in constructing
the spectacle and lore of law. 169
TV NEWS COVERAGE
We found thirty-eight spot news broadcasts mentioning the verdict
on TV (fourteen national, twenty-four local) in the two days after the
jury award was announced. For the most part, this coverage was similar
to the newspaper coverage in what it did and did not provide for public
consumption, although it was even less substantial and accurate than the
print versions. Accounts were riddled with the same errors and, more
important, omissions of critical elements heard at the trial, thus again
emphasizing the recklessness of the accident over the dangerous product. One important difference from spot coverage in newspapers was
that local TV broadcasts often openly ridiculed the decision that they
reported as news. One report joked with a pun about “burned buns” at
McDonald’s. 170 Another sardonically reported that Liebeck (after “she
spilled scalding coffee on herself in a McDonald’s restaurant”) said,
“hot coffee is terrible on the groin and buttocks.”‘ 17
‘ Yet another report
quoted a customer and an attorney who both said they thought “the suit
was stupid,” offered no parallel defenses of the suit, and ended by pointing to Liebeck “explaining how to get rich after spilling a hot beverage
on their crotch (sic) …. 99172
NEWS MAGAZINES AND NEWSLETrERS
Newsmagazines also extended considerable recognition to the hot
coffee incident, usually in similarly abridged, misleading, often inaccurate tort tale-like versions. Indeed, a quick search of “Academic Universe” identified numerous mentions for “McDonald’s and coffee and
169. Our forthcoming book will provide much greater detail and examples for the forms of
media coverage briefly outlined here.
170. Eyewitness News (KABC Los Angeles television broadcast, Aug. 18, 1994, 11 PM).
171. Eyewitness News (KABC Los Angeles television broadcast, Aug. 18, 1994, 4PM).
172. Eyewitness News (KTF’V Los Angeles television broadcast, Aug. 18, 1994, 10PM).
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burn or scald” in Newsweek, Time, Business Week, US News & World
Report, and Forbes between August, 1994 and January 1, 2000. Most
such accounts echoed the critical editorials in the newspapers – full of
misleading errors, focused on the accident rather than the product, and
again openly disdainful of the irresponsible plaintiff and the capricious
legal system.
TV NEWS FEATURES AND TALK SHOWS
Ms. Liebeck’s saga played widely on television feature news and
interview shows. For example, the case was mentioned and Stella
Liebeck’s daughter interviewed shortly after the incident on the Larry
King Live show. Perhaps the most incendiary treatment was on an ABC
special, The Blame Game: Are We a Country of Victims?, hosted by the
controversial John Stossel.173 Like his later attack on the civil legal system, The Trouble with Lawyers,174 Stossel’s show mixed selected anecdotes, assorted facts, and a barrage of leading rhetorical questions into a
mix of caustic commentary and amusing entertainment. The show
began provocatively by citing the McDonald’s Coffee Case as one of
several examples of business owner’s complaints about “what’s wrong
with America.”‘ 75 In short, claims one interviewee, “everybody’s a
damn victim… We have so much to give, and so many who take.”‘ 176
The show later used a highly selective, simplified cartoon version of the
story to illustrate what Stossel posed as a fundamental breakdown in
Americans’ individual responsibility, civil law, and culture. Roger Conner, of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, was asked
to cap the sermon:
The word of these lawsuits spills out into society, enters into the
national conversation. And people start thinking that this is the appropriate way to live… It makes people think, I’d be a chump if I did
otherwise. If I take responsibility for what I do and for what happens
to me, I’m a fool. Now, when that idea gets loose, America’s in
trouble …. This whole victimization, it’s like a – it’s like a disease
that’s weakening America’s moral fiber. 177
A host of other shows on virtually every major channel offered up similar rituals for responsibility that ripped the hot coffee case, the plaintiff,
and the judgment.
173. The Blame Game: Are We a Country of Victims? (ABC television broadcast Aug. 17,
1995) available at http://www.LEXIS.NewsTranscripts.com [hereinafter Stossel, Blame Game].
174. The Trouble with Lawyers (ABC television broadcast, Aug. 17, 1997).
175. Stossel, Blame Game, supra note 173.
176. Id.
177. Id.
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LATE NIGHT TV
Given the ridicule that permeated supposedly serious news coverage, it is not surprising that late night talk show hosts appropriated Ms.
Liebeck’s saga for their own comic routines. The best-known episode
involved Jay Leno, who several times told jokes referring to the case.
Attorney Morgan told us that he wrote Leno in protest, and Leno actually called him in response.1 78 However, Leno continued to make jokes
about scalding spills of McDonald’s coffee at least through February 9,
2001.179 David Letterman also made reference to the hot coffee liability
issue a number of times over several years.’ 80
PRIME TIME TV COMEDY
Viewers who do not stay up to watch late night television could
catch a longer comic play on the dispute over spilled coffee on the
wildly popular Seinfeld show. The specific episode, titled “The Maestro,” initially ran October 5, 1995, and has been rerun many times.’ 8′
The show focuses on the aftermath of an incident in which the zany and
socially inept Kramer spills coffee on himself when stuffing a Styrofoam
cup into his pants to sneak a latte into a movie theater. After filing a
lawsuit, he confronts his friend Jerry who expresses surprise at Kramer’s
litigiousness. That prompts Kramer to reply “Oh, I can be quite litigious,”182 as we recorded in an epigraph for this essay.
CORPORATE ADVERTISEMENTS
It took a while, it seems, but eventually the advertising industry
appropriated references and images of the case for humorous promotions
as well. We found national magazine advertisements for a major hot
chocolate product and television commercials for both a major phone
company and several automobile manufacturers making explicit references to the hot coffee case. 1
83 In a like advertisement, a little girl says,
“Here’s a scalding hot cup of tea, Grandma” in the back seat of Mercedes-Benz careening over rough roads. The fact that corporations could
so blithely appropriate the image to promote their products reflects both
the dominant story line attached to the coffee case in mass mediated
culture and the privileged position of corporate producers in that culture.
178. Interview with S. Reed Morgan, in San Antonio, Tex. (Mar. 23, 2000).
179. Tonight Show with Jay Leno (NBC television broadcast, Feb. 9, 2001).
180. See Greenlee, Kramer v. Java World, supra note 6, at 702 n.8.
181. Seinfeld, The Maestro, supra note 5.
182. For extensive analysis of this show and its implications, see Greenlee, Kramer v. Java
World, supra note 6, at 704-09.
183. Advertisements photocopied in authors’ files.
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THE MOVIES
A bit to our surprise, the coffee incident has been alluded to in only
one major movie that we have found – Goodbye Lover, starring Ellen
DeGeneres. 184 Discarding a newspaper, Ms. DeGeneres’s character
offers the last epigraph with which we began this case study.
CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS
As the Liebeck story was mocked in popular entertainment, it was
mostly scorned by public officials as well, which of course found its
way back into many newspaper and TV accounts. As such, serious news
and popular entertainment, official politics and political comedy, fused
together into a complex stream of anecdotal references to Liebeck’s litigation as leading symbol of a legal system and civil society gone wrong.
“Everybody in America is fed up with being sued by everybody for everything. I just have to refer to the case of the lady that sued and won for
having been scalded by a cup of coffee she bought in McDonald’s 5
minutes earlier,” proclaimed Representative Kasich as Republicans
geared up to take action to limit frivolous lawsuits in 1994.85 Indeed,
an electronic subject search of the congressional hearings in 1995 confirmed that the McDonald’s Coffee Case was a staple of political discourse. Just as the mass media had reconstructed a successful claim of
legal right into a cartoon, so did politicians use that cartoon to justify
reconstructing and righting the law itself.
THE TORT TALE ENDURES
We have just sampled here the many forums in which the McDonald’s Coffee Case has become a prominent part of the prevailing legal
lore in America. In fact, as one of us sat writing a draft of this very study
on July 13, 2000, he heard a story on National Public Radio about a man
who had sued after being scalded by coffee in a restaurant. The man
insisted that ceramic cups have warning labels on them. The judge
denied the claim, saying “What next? Warnings on steak knives?”‘ 86
Such a report obviously was intended as humorous fluff on a serious
184. GOODBYE LOVER (Warner Bros. 1999).
185. 140 CONG. REC. H9766m (daily ed. Sept. 27, 1994) (statement of Rep. Kasich).
186. We point to a final example. On October 8, 2000, the Seattle Times ran a story about a
woman who filed a legal claim for $110,000 against McDonald’s because she was burned by a
pickle that fell on her chin from a McDonald’s hamburger. See Reno, 18 Other Women Win Spot
in New York Shrine, SEATTLE TIMES, Oct. 8, 2000, at A 12. We have no idea about, or interest in,
the facts of the case, which may well be a spurious claim that will go nowhere. The relevant point
is that the story was even told and framed as a typical cartoonish tort tale, from the title –
“Lesson from woman’s lawsuit – Next time, hold the pickles” – to the end. Id.
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broadcast. But our point is that it would not be considered funny without the lingering legacy of Liebeck in the public space.
ANALYSIS: HOW A COURT CASE BECAME A TORT TALE
Having seen how an understandable if not unassailable judgment
was transformed from a legal outcome to a politically charged cultural
icon, we now assess implications of our case study for our contentions in
our larger project.
THE MASS MEDIA
The McDonald’s Coffee Case demonstrates in great detail how
ordinary news reporting practices both select particular types of events
and construct them for the reading public in highly subjective, limited,
and problematic ways. But why did this atypical legal case become so
typically newsworthy? While many factors were involved, the juxtaposition of a familiar accident with a seemingly astounding award provided a perfect mix of the personal, dramatic, and normal that the press
loves, all bound together in a discrete incident. Aspects of the case
almost perfectly fit the standard conventions of newsworthiness for
“infotainment” coverage. For one thing, the disputing parties fit very
familiar images: an elderly woman and the most familiar, ubiquitous
family restaurant chain in the world. That nearly everyone has taken out
food and drinks from a McDonald’s drive-through no doubt mattered
also. Moreover, the fact that nearly all persons have spilled hot coffee
or hot chocolate or tea on themselves likewise highlights the routine
character of the case. What “infotainment” could not handle well –
those aspects of the Defective Products Liability Narrative that persuaded jurors, to cite the most telling example – could be omitted from
coverage without readers’ or viewers’ notice.
As a result of both newsworthiness conventions and routine exposure to parallel tort tale narratives, widespread coverage of this case: (1)
privileged certain facts that fit the predilections for personalized and
dramatized stories while omitting other information, issues, and story
lines in ways that left the account highly fragmented and routinized; (2)
provided little attention to the key facts and narrative logic that proved
successful in the official trial phase; (3) failed to provide perspective for
this particular, atypical case relative to broader patterns in civil litigation; and, as such, (4) re-presented an event in ways that were open to,
and even invited, interpretations consistent with the tort reform agenda
by elite news spinners and the mass audience. Thin, selective initial
coverage quickly gave way to a simplistic anecdotal version of the story
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that has become a staple of American conventional wisdom about law, a
notable chapter of what we have labeled “law’s lore.”
This case study also reveals parallels and interconnections between
newspaper coverage and other media of cultural knowledge production
– especially television daily news, news features, talk shows, and comedy shows, as well as radio, movies, and public forums of official politics – in our “infotainment”-oriented society. Evidence in this article
suggests that this broader complex of technologically mediated information production today may be even more conducive to legend production
than that of newspapers alone.’ 87 Moreover, attention to multiple media
manifestations of the hot coffee story distinguishes its impact from
familiar “big” stories in the news. The infamous story of Stella Liebeck
did not hit the public over the head in one huge attack of front-page
headlines. Rather, the steady parade of small, thin accounts and brief
allusions in multiple media over a sustained period of time quietly supplanted a real victim (McDonald’s or herself or both) with a caricature
familiar across the American legal and political culture.’ 88
Our case study of Ms. Liebeck’s saga thus demonstrates a more
fundamental general theme of our larger project-that mass media have
played a relatively independent institutional role in the specific social
construction of legality. By legality, we refer to Ewick and Silbey’s
provocative, expansive concept regarding the “‘ideas, problems, or situations of interest’ to unofficial actors as they take account of, anticipate,
or imagine ‘legal acts and behaviors.”” 89 Legality thus operates “as
both an interpretative framework and a set of resources with which and
through which the social world (including that part known as law) is
constituted.”‘ 9 ° This role of the media in constructing popular legal
187. We have tried to follow the prescription of Ben Page, who argues that:
[W]e should not study only what does or does not appear about politics in just one type of medium, like television news; as far as possible, we should look at what all
the media have to say, including elite newspapers and journals of opinion, as well as
more popular communications channels. We need to pay attention to the totality of
political information that is made available … to the public.
BENJAMIN I. PAGE, WHO DELIBERATES? MASS MEDIA IN MODERN DEMOCRACY 7 (1996). The
problem was that, contrary to Page’s expectations, the further we looked, the more inadequate,
misleading, and skewed the media coverage of the McDonald’s Coffee Case became.
188. It has not been our purpose as authors to adopt a broadly critical perspective regardingfor whatever the many complex reasons-the increasing superficiality and fantasy-like character
of mass mediated political discourse in our nation. But, unfortunately, such a posture is difficult
to avoid in presenting our case study findings.
189. EwICK & SILBEY, THE COMMON PLACE OF LAW, supra note 2, at 23.
190. Id. at 23, 273 n.l. We should qualify our position here. Our argument is about the
widespread production and dissemination of particular interpretations of the coffee case in mass
mediated culture. We do not presume that most citizens passively accept these produced story
lines and their implications. Legality is constructed and reconstructed anew in ongoing dynamic
processes by differently situated citizens. Still, we believe that repeated exposure to a particular
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meaning is most simply shown by the fact that the story of scalded Ms.
Liebeck broke quickly after the jury verdict with little foreknowledge
even among tort reform specialists about the lawsuit. It is worth noting
in this regard that McDonald’s attorneys and representatives said very
little immediately after the judgment and experts or other sources cited
in the initial articles were weighted to the side of the plaintiff. 19′ In
other words, the mold for problematic public construction of the
McDonald’s Coffee Case was initially set by journalists relatively free of
direct instrumental input from tort reformers and other media-attentive
elites. Within two weeks after the event, copious information that would
have provided a fuller, more complex account was available to newspapers at very small cost in money or time, but those sources were rarely
accessed in the interest of informing readers. In short, newsworthy routines largely defeated legal constructions of the case that won in trial and
constructed new legal images for the citizenry to consume, appropriate,
and variously integrate into their reserve of “common sense.”
At the same time, however, this claim of institutional independence
must be qualified with regard to both instrumental actions of elites who
routinely “feed” the press and the broader ideological and organizational
forces in American society that shape the press as an institution. We
take up the former matter in the next section. With regard to the latter,
we again stress the propensity for individualistic interpretations that
focus on personal responsibility, suspicion toward government intervention, respect for corporate forms of ownership, fascination with large
sums of money, etc.-all expressing and reproducing dominant ideological currents in American society-demonstrated by coverage of the
McDonald’s Coffee Case and other disputes. These tendencies in turn
are similarly reinforced by the pressures of corporate organization
privileging rapid news generation for easy consumption to maximize
sales to customers and advertisers, thus further shaping the context in
which the routines of reporting legal events takes place.
TORT REFORMERS
The argument in the previous section is not intended to suggest that
the legions of sophisticated tort reformers contributed little to the rapid
rise of Stella Liebeck as a symbol for a legal system gone awry. Most
important, the preceding fifteen or so years of concerted tort reform
advocacy assaulting the legal system and personal injury lawyers constory line and normative logic significantly delimits and shapes the cultural repertoire from which
citizens construct legal meaning. There is, we expect, considerable lure to law’s lore.
191. Our pilot study of newspaper coverage revealed that sources cited by journalists heavily
favored Stella’s attorneys and others on “her side.”
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tributed greatly to the context of media reporting, elite discourse, and
public understanding that quickly elevated the McDonald’s Coffee Case
to great symbolic significance. The tort reform movement and corporate
campaign to impugn the legal system and celebrate norms of individual
responsibility provided a public appetite and familiar menu that the
McDonald’s Coffee Case served very well.’ 92 That the movement’s
standard charges against the legal system found or generated many allies
among newspaper editors and columnists is clear from previous
evidence.
Moreover, tort reformers contributed directly to accelerating and
sustaining the continuing familiarity of the story in the ongoing phase of
the story’s public life (since 1995). While the appointed spokespersons
and spinners for tort reform did not influence the initial phases of the
public interpretation, they had a field day with the McDonald’s Coffee
Case once they mobilized in subsequent months. “Tort reformers …
gleefully seized on the case as the epitome of frivolity,” confirms one
observer.’93 The incident became a staple on the list of Horror Stories
maintained by the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) and
others, press releases, and other stories.’ 94 Reporters have told us in
interviews that the McDonald’s Coffee Case quickly became a routine
component in the standard tort reform literature regularly fed to the
press. For example, Robert Ash, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, made the case a lead item in a published and widely distributed
address, “Is It Time to Reform the Adversarial Civil Justice System?” in
late 1996.’
Ash stated:
In sum: when a plaintiff can win a million dollar settlement from
McDonald’s because its coffee is too hot, when suing and being sued
become normal ways of doing business or pursuing political and
social agendas, when procedure triumphs over substance… It’s time
for fundamental reform to make the legal system accord with new
realities. ‘ 96
192. See generally STEPHEN DANIELS & JOANNE MARTIN, CIVIL JURIES & THE POLITICS OF
REFORM (1995); Galanter, Oil Strike, supra note 18; Saks, Do We Really Know Anything?, supra
note 18.
193. Saundra Torry, Tort and Retort: The Battle Over Reform Heats Up, WASH. POST, Mar. 6,
1995, at P7.
194. See American Tort Reform Association, Litigation Horror Stories: Stories That Show a
Legal System That’s Out of Control, at http://www.atra.rog/hstories.flml (last visited Nov. 21,
2001).
195. ROBERT ASH, DISCOVERY INQUIRY, Is IT TIME TO REFORM THE ADVERSIAL CIVIL JUSTICE
SYSTEM? (1996).
196. Id. It is worth noting that Ash confounds business-on-business litigation, which truly may
have exploded, with product liability and tort litigation, which has exploded far less, to say the
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An ATRA press release decrying a lawsuit against toothbrush manufacturers as late as April, 1999, listed the McDonald’s Coffee Case as the
leading honoree in the “Crazy Lawsuit and Warning Label Hall of
Fame.”197
Corporations were also quick to get into the act of exploiting the
high profile case. Mobil Oil took out a substantial advertisement in the
New York Times that cited the case, noting that “nearly $3 million was
awarded to a customer who spilled hot coffee on herself.”‘ 98 Echoing
ATRA press releases and paid ads, the Chamber of Commerce sponsored its own ad on the radio: “Is it fair to get a couple of million dollars
from a restaurant just because you spilled your hot coffee on yourself?
Of course not. It’s ridiculous. But it happened.”‘ 99
It is important to underline that the McDonald’s Coffee Case was
not just another anecdotal tort tale manipulated by the reform troops,
however. By 1994, the national tort reform movement was flagging in
its energy. A decade of failure to pass major national legislation in Congress had sapped energies and nurtured frustration. The “easy” victories
at the state level had been exhausted, and even these were being undone
or undercut through effective litigation campaigns by trial lawyers.
Moreover, while social science studies refuting the tort reform message
had not widely penetrated the public space, challenges to the accuracy of
oft-told tort tales and the reformers’ grand grievances were becoming
more familiar to political elites and leading journalists. The empirically
informed retorts on torts by crusading law professors such as Marc
Galanter (University of Wisconsin) and Theodore Eisenberg (Cornell
University) were regularly finding their way into top national news stories. In short, the tort reform movement was on its heels, locked into an
increasingly defensive battle.
Then, along came the McDonald’s Coffee Case – the perfect anecdotal antidote to the movement’s maladies. No better case could have
been fabricated by the movement to provide an effective “We told you
so” to skeptics in the media, the political establishment, and the general
public. Ms. Liebeck’s saga, reduced to factoids by ordinary news
reporting routines and repeatedly re-spun by reformers, quickly hotwired the currents of concern about our failing civil legal system and
flagging ethos of individual discipline. It seems hardly a coincidence
that the next year the story circulated widely in hearings that led to the
least. Perhaps needless to add, it is unlikely that McDonald’s settled for a million dollars a
judgment that had already been reduced to $640,000 almost three months before.
197. Press Release, American Tort Reform Association, Crazy Lawsuit & Warning Label Hall
of Fame (Apr. 15, 1999), available at http://www.atra.org/press.flml (last checked Jan. 1, 2001).
198. N.Y. Tim4Fs, Feb. 16, 1995 (on file with author).
199. Cited in Tony, supra note 193.
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first major national tort reform legislation passed by Congress.200
Although President Clinton vetoed that bill, it was clear that the movement had found new life in the aftermath of the scalding coffee story.
Indeed, Clinton’s successor in the White House made his name as a
Texas governor successfully leading the tort reform charge; both of the
leading party presidential and vice-presidential candidates were open
supporters, in varying degrees, of national tort reform.
ATTORNEY REED MORGAN AND THE PLAINTIFFS’ BAR
Our larger study of tort reform politics has found that the plaintiff’s
bar has not actively or aggressively challenged the reformers’ charges
against the tort system in the court of public opinion. Moreover, we
were somewhat surprised to find that Ms. Liebeck’s lead attorney, S.
Reed Morgan, did not actively attempt to shape initial media constructions of this specific case. Unlike many politically experienced attorneys in public litigation and the stereotype of a publicity-seeking
ambulance chaser, Mr. Morgan offered no immediate press release feeding reporters important information framing the logic of the winning
case. While he frequently commented on the case, his published
answers were mostly responses to specific reporters’ questions rather
than efforts to amplify why he thought Ms. Liebeck won or the case’s
connection to larger public issues. Indeed, Morgan clearly indicated in
interviews with us that he had no way of anticipating the caricature of
the case that would emerge from the press or its rapid transformation
into a symbol for the tort reform crusade.20′
Once negative reaction developed, Morgan did write a letter clarifying ignored aspects of the case he presented and defending the verdict
for the public. Exemplary was the letter published in the National Law
Journal on October 24, 1994.202 Morgan told us that he wanted to offset
the harm of the negative publicity “because it was hurting the system
badly . . . people that were trying to do something to protect people
through the justice system.” But it was too little too late to make a
difference.
The wider community of trial lawyers also was relatively slow and
mostly reactive in its efforts to frame the story in positive ways. An
200. See 141 CONG. REC. H2661 (daily ed. Mar. 6, 1995).
201. One reason for this is that Morgan himself was surprised by the size of the jury verdict
which, he told us, he expected to be between one half and one million dollars. He also noted that
lawyers generally “are not educated to handle PR questions. We don’t have anyone representing
us as PR spokespersons and we are very misunderstood.” Interview with S. Reed Morgan, in San
Antonio, Tex. (Mar. 23, 2000).
202. S. Reed Morgan, Verdict Against McDonald’s Is Fully Justified, NAT’L L.J., Oct. 24,
1994, at A20.
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excellent account by Gordon E. Tabor, former President of the Indiana
Trial Lawyers Association, was written just weeks after the jury verdict.
However, his McFacts, McMedia, and McCoffee had little visibility .to
the mainstream press and general public. As noted above, Ralph Nader
attempted to present the overlooked facts and key issues to legislators in
1995, and he later wrote an excellent account of the case with Wesley
Smith in their 1996 book No Contest.2 03 Likewise, the Association of
Trial Lawyers of America website carried a defense of the case in the
late 1990s, but that also came rather late and was aimed at specialized
audiences. 20 Again, this relatively tepid and delayed defense of the
case illustrates some of the general political limitations of the plaintiff’s
bar as an advocacy group.2 °5 Moreover, these facts confirm the point
that the press was relatively free to frame the case of the scalding coffee
according to their usual routines and familiar cues, inadvertently doing
much of the tort reformers’ work for them.
One of the most interesting and important manifestations of the
legal lore surrounding the McDonald’s Coffee Case was among jurors.
It is worth noting that the legendary coffee case cultivated skepticism
among jurors that was widely recognized by attorneys on both sides of
tort cases. “It comes up all the time. . . The McDonald’s case has
entered into American folklore. It has become the poster child for tort
reform,” summarizes James Burgund, a jury consultant with Jury Selection Sciences in Dallas, Texas.2
“6 Reed Morgan confirmed this point
based on his own experience. Because of the negative stigma attached
to the McDonald’s Coffee Case, Morgan quickly witnessed the prejudice
that subsequent jurors brought to his cases. In fact, Morgan has routinely filed motions requesting that no one link him or his law firm to
the earlier case to obviate guilt by association with the legend. That
precaution, however, meant that Mr. Morgan could not do what he knew
other plaintiffs’ lawyers had begun to do – to anticipate the widespread
prejudice and talk about how misleading the case was during jury selection or early in a trial, or to use discussion of the McDonald’s Coffee
Case to educate the jury about how the process really works.
Morgan himself was deeply hurt emotionally, professionally, and
financially by the legacy of the Liebeck case. While the immediate set203. RALPH NADER & WESLEY SMIrH, No CONTEST, supra note 23, at 262-314.
204. Press Release, Association of Trial Lawyers of America, The McDonald’s Scalding
Coffee Case, available at http://www.atla.org/cjfacts/other/mcdonald.ht (last checked Feb. 5,
2001).
205. On the tension between professional norms and political advocacy, see CAUSE
LAWYERING: POLITICAL COMMITMENTS & PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILrITES (Austin Sarat and
Stuart Scheingold eds., 1998).
206. Greenlee, Kramer v. Java World, supra note 6, at 703, n.12.
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
tlement of case generated a decent return, his small practice and its modest income declined after the case. He represented several more victims
of hot liquids, but then resolved to take no more such cases. Most
important was the sense that he and his humble campaign against dangerous products had been wrongly charged and convicted by the press.
The one emotional thing that came out of this for me was, I kind of
had the sense that if you really worked something real, real hard and
get to the truth and win, that’s the right thing to do. And I was just
– there was this tremendous irony, that here’s this lawyer who is not
really a high profile lawyer, who tries to do quality work and does
exactly what he’s supposed to do and then this whole tort reform
slam comes out of the case. It’s like, why don’t you pick on a guy
that’s got a hundred million dollars on a benzene case or an asbestos
case? And the obvious answer is because they can make this one
look ridiculous, but the nature of the facts …. I still feel to this day
like it [the Liebeck case] is just escalated somewhere where it
shouldn’t be.2
” 7
In our interview, Morgan was unwavering about the justice of the
verdict for Ms. Liebeck and the campaign against dangerous products
like excessively hot liquids. Ironically, he echoed Steve Martin’s waggish suggestion that the jury verdict modified millennia of thought about
justice: “It’s sort of like, ‘God, you know after a thousand years of civilization, how did it happen that people didn’t understand the risk of
harm?”‘ 2 08 In Morgan’s perspective, the McDonald’s coffee legend did
offer a case study about greed, manipulation, and amoral institutional
practices. The problem is that the legend itself focused on the wrong
parties. This is what he told us about why the coffee case became a
media phenomenon:
If you think it through what is going on, the mass media is controlled
by big money. It’s owned by big corporations. And they are much
more interested in selling news and selling papers than selling the
truth. So, and then they have the tort reformers feeding it. You have
a certain bent of editors for a lot of national newspapers that are conservative. They see a lot of lawsuit news, high verdicts, because people call in high verdicts, they don’t call in the 60 percent or so of jury
verdicts that are zero verdicts. So they get a perception that here’s
another out-of-control lawsuit so they write it up. Because they know
people want to read that and buy papers.2
” 9
207. Interview with S. Reed Morgan, in San Antonio, Tex. (Mar. 23, 2000).
208. Id.
209. Id.
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STELLA LIEBECK: THE ULTIMATE VICTIM
While highly tempted, we chose not to try to meet with Ms.
Liebeck to complete our research. 210 By all accounts, she also felt
wrongly persecuted by the treatment of her personal tragedy by the
American press, the corporate elite, the tort reform crusade, and public
211vitmzd oc a opinion. She was victimized twice, once by a terrible scalding accident and then even more devastatingly by the very routine workings of
American media politics that blamed her for her painful fate. We saw
no reason to impose on her further with our questions regarding how she
now feels about becoming an enduring icon in our nation’s legal lore.
CONCLUSION: THE IMPLICATIONS OF LAW’S LORE
This essay has aimed to show how an unlikely lawsuit over spilt
coffee was constructed by the mass media and tort reformers into a powerful symbol of runaway litigiousness, a legal system gone awry, and the
erosion of traditional norms regarding individual self-restraint. We conclude by briefly pondering the broader implications of this legend’s legacy for American legal culture.
Most generally, prevailing popular constructions of the hot coffee
case have at once reflected and reinforced cultural tendencies to view
relationships and events in terms of individual responsibility and blame.
As such, the moralistic, individualizing, disciplinary logics of law are
underwritten by popular representations about law. The McDonald’s
Coffee Case also, however, illustrates the very social costs and constraining implications of these logics.
We consider first the consequences for political debate about the
rationality of the existing tort law system. The construction of the
McDonald’s case as a lightning rod for concern about the alleged litigation crisis inhibited the emergence of alternative constructions that complicated issues of individual blame with attention to other integrally
related public concerns.21 2 For example, the injuries suffered by Ms
Liebeck and her frustrated resort to litigation could instead have highlighted the need for better consumer protection standards, better regulatory oversight, the need for expanded medical benefits for the elderly,
the inadequate medical insurance options for most citizens in the United
210. We were eager at the outset of our research to get Ms. Liebeck’s perspective. Our
reluctance to victimize her anew grew as we learned more about the case.
211. See Torry, supra note 193.
212. On the inadequate conceptions of individual responsibility and fault, and their tension
with other competing goals of safety, welfare, and compensation, at the heart of tort law, see
Richard L. Abel, A Critique of Torts, 37 UCLA L. REV. 785 (1990). See generally Abel, Torts,
supra note 16. For parallel arguments, see Martha Minow, Surviving Victim Talk, 40 UCLA L.
REV. 1430 (1993).
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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI LAW REVIEW
States, or the lack of workplace leave compensation policies to deal with
family emergencies. After all, the high costs of medical treatment and
the loss of wages by her daughter who had to take care of Ms. Liebeck
prompted the reluctant plaintiff to sue. 2 13 But virtually nowhere – in
the media, among any of the major players on either side of the dispute,
or among the politicians and policy advocates who appropriated the
symbolic case for policy reasons – were any of these policy concerns
raised in connection to the incident. This is particularly striking,
because just a short time before the incident, President Clinton had
unveiled proposals for radical transformation of health care and medical
insurance in the United States.
Moreover, the core challenge to the enormous discretionary power,
pecuniary motives, and unaccountable practices of corporate producers
identified by Liebeck’s lawyers barely saw the light of media attention.
Indeed, what media coverage, popular legend, and political debate all
obscured was just how anomalous was Stella Liebeck’s victory in court
against a multinational mega-corporation. The motives of corporatesponsored tort reformers in assailing this and many other cases are clear
enough, of course. Plaintiffs of small means and low status who win
substantial awards for challenging corporate recklessness destabilize the
prevailing legal logic of distributing economic costs widely and generally supporting the unequal structure of capitalist society. Nevertheless,
political activists, lawyers, scholars – including those on the ostensible
political Left – were drawn into defending the existing inadequate, inegalitarian, inaccessible tort law system and contesting the case’s significance in the moralistic terms of “individual responsibility” and reckless
rapacity defined by tort reformers. The social construction of the
McDonald’s Coffee Case thus illustrates the ways in which prevailing
hegemonic norms, institutional arrangements, and power relations
reproduce themselves in politics. We surely appreciate the importance
of opportunities for consumers to mobilize law to challenge harmful corporate practices within the existing system.21 4 However, the fact that
virtually all parties have assessed the McDonald’s case almost solely for
what it did or did not reveal about an epidemic of predatory plaintiffs
and their greedy attorneys dramatically evinces the narrowly moralistic
and undemocratic public discourse characteristic of the contemporary
213. Of course, the anomalous fact that Ms. Liebeck won compensation for her claim diverted
attention from the inherent inequality and inadequacy of tort mechanisms for promoting safety and
compensating victims generally, especially for lower income and otherwise marginalized people.
See Abel, Torts, supra note 16.
214. See generally MICHAEL W. MCCANN, RIGHTS AT WORK (1994); MICHAEL W. MCCANN,
TAKING REFORM SERIOUSLY (1986).
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neo-liberal era.21 5
Finally, we note yet one other way in which the hot coffee legend is
indirectly, subtly, and generally significant in contemporary American
culture. We call attention again to how popular constructions of the hot
coffee case have tended to reverse the very attributions of liability found
in the official court of law. As is often the case in other legal domains
such as criminal justice or welfare law, 16 prevailing narratives tended
toward blaming the victim for the painful injuries she suffered and thus
stigmatized her efforts to claim rights as a means of redress. Left with
little recourse but appeal to a legal system that protects profit, individualizes claims of harm, and commodifies relief, the seriously burned
plaintiff was pilloried as selfish, greedy, and irresponsible in the court of
public opinion. This dynamic parallels closely the ways that allegations
about excessive lititigiousness and rights claiming perpetuate what
Greenhouse, Yngvesson, and Engel call “narratives of [law] avoidance”
in small American towns.21 These narratives are ideological statements
and norms that work to “create or impose order within the community,
to define or deflect change, and to articulate a philosophy of individualism and equality that could also be reconciled with their tenacious
defense of the status quo. 21 8 In the same way, we suggest, the tort
tales that we are told and retell among ourselves impose a disciplinary
force of restraint on the perceptions and practices of citizens as legal
actors throughout contemporary American society. We have already
noted examples of how the McDonald’s Coffee Case reinforced concerns about plaintiff greed among jurors in subsequent cases around the
nation that personal injury lawyers must address. Other scholarship confirms the anti-plaintiff, anti-rights, and pro-corporate predispositions that
jurors typically bring into the courtroom. 219 And yet other studies have
similarly demonstrated how local legal officials – clerks, judges,
police, etc. – routinely discourage and dismiss legal action on basic
rights claims among citizens, and, especially among those “undeserving,” many who are least privileged by inherited relations.22 ° We thus
suggest that the legacy of the McDonald’s Coffee Case illustrates the
215. See generally NIKOLAS S. ROSE, POWERS OF FREEDOM (1999).
216. See generally STUART A. SCHEINGOLD, THE POLITICS OF STREET CRIME: CRIMINAL
PROCESS AND CULTURAL OBSESSION (1991) (dominance of “volitional” models of crime); A.
SARAT, WHEN THE STATE KILLS (2001) (similar treatment of capital punishment in American
popular cultures); JOEL F. HANDLER & JEHESKEL HASENFELD, WE THE POOR PEOPLE: WORK,
POVERTY, AND WELFARE (1997) (similar treatment on welfare discourse).
217. GREENHOUSE, YNGVESSON, & ENGEL, supra note 14, at 119.
218. Id.
219. See generally VALERIE HANS, BUSINESS ON TRIAL: THE CIVIL JURY AND CORPORATE
RESPONSIBILITY (2000).
220. GREENHOUSE, YNGVESSON, & ENGEL, supra note 14, at 119; see generally SALLY MERRY,
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subtle ways in which prevailing hegemonic norms, institutional arrangements, and power relations reproduce themselves in ordinary life.22’
The extensive, if unwitting, complicity of the American mass media in
contributing to both the reproduction of such legal lore and its centrality
in our shared national culture is no small part of this process by which
the prevailing hierarchical, unaccountable order is sustained.
GETTING JUSTICE GETTING EVEN (1990); BARBARA YNGVESSON, VIRTUOUS CITIZENS DISRUPTIVE
SUBJECTS (1993).
221. Of course, ideologies are dynamic, indeterminate, and contradictory in social practice,
thus facilitating resistance and even challenge to hegemonic constructions and dominant
relationships in society. We recognize that narratives often are explicitly counter-hegemonic, and
that various versions of “anti-law” and “law reform” narratives often hold significant liberatory,
egalitarian, or democratic promise. See EwICK & SILBEY, THE COMMON PLACE OF LAW, supra
note 2. Hence it is important to acknowledge that our claim is not a general one about popular
narratives involving legal disputes. However, we do contend that news coverage of civil litigation
overall and in specific high-profile instances such as the McDonald’s Coffee Case does tend to
support hegemonic versions of dominant ideological traditions and to perpetuate status quo
insulation of corporate power form challenge, although that is not always or necessarily the case.
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