Hot Coffee

• Glory Days

  

  fan_from_texas;830142 wrote:It's not easy, but you have to do it. To be compensated, we have to figure out how much a life (or a limb, or mental health, or whatever else) is worth.
  
  FWIW, the issue isn't that the lady didn't know the coffee was hot; it's that the coffee was unreasonably hot. The idea is that you can warn about a danger, and yet if your warning doesn't serve to put people on notice of the actual danger, that's not quite good enough. E.g., if I put a sign on my lawn that says "Stay off grass -- Danger!", and then I bury land mines throughout the yard, I'm not likely to stay out of trouble because landmines aren't exactly something that can be foreseen by a sign warning about danger. (That's obviously hyperbole to illustrate the point).
  

  
  hmmmmm what if the sign says "warning landmines in grass"?.....i think i may have found a way to keep people off my lawn!
• iclfan2

  

  BoatShoes;826992 wrote:The question is though, do people not have faith in jury's to make the correct decision? Very few cases ever get to a jury and yet we should let some legislators in Columbus or Washington decide that there ought to be damage caps rather than let the juries of reasonable peers determine what they ought to be based upon each unique set of facts?

  
  Who says they are reasonable? Can't almost anyone get picked for jury duty? Which would mean a ton of morons are getting chosen to sit on a jury.
• fan_from_texas

  I Wear Pants;830196 wrote:Isn't that the same sort of thing conservatives scream about when talking about the "death panels" and such?

  
  Not that I know of. Besides, I like death panels.
  

  iclfan2;830506 wrote:Who says they are reasonable? Can't almost anyone get picked for jury duty? Which would mean a ton of morons are getting chosen to sit on a jury.

  
  My recollection (from reading a study a few years ago) is that if you present a case to a panel of experts, and present a case to a jury, the damage results tend to be pretty similar. In large part, I think juries tend to get it right.
• Cleveland Buck

  

  Glory Days;830336 wrote:hmmmmm what if the sign says "warning landmines in grass"?.....i think i may have found a way to keep people off my lawn!

  
  Well, if the warning says "Landmines in grass", I would expect that there are landmines in the grass, just as with a warning that says "Coffee is hot", I would expect the coffee to be hot.