Hot Coffee, the fast-paced, info-packed exploration of tort reform exposes the real story behind Stella Liebeck, who sued McDonalds after being badly burned by spilled coffee, an incident which wrongly entered the collective consciousness as a prime example of a “frivolous” lawsuit. First time director Susan Saladoff, a civil litigator with 25 years of experience, uses the McDonalds coffee case as the starting point and from there builds a strong case that tort reform, binding arbitration and non-economic damage caps subvert justice and benefit big business.

When some bureaucrat at the Department of Defense sent a memo to Congress opposing Sen. Al Franken’s amendment to protect victims of rape, the neo-liberal bureaucracy was doing what bureaucracies always do. It was erasing the human in deference to a system, and with it all hope of morally defensible action. In my own case [...]