Other places were sucessfully selling coffee at a lower temperature than McDonalds. While burns are still possible at those lower temperature a few extra seconds would have given her time to remove her clothing which would have eeduced the severity of the burns.

People are not pushing personal responsibility onto McDonalds - McDonalds took responsibility when they admitted that they preferred to settle 700 cases (some including full thickness burns) out of court than adjust their procedures.

Your personal preference is for undrinkably hot coffee. McDonalds could have offered two temperatures - regular and extra hot. Someone asking for extra hot is taking personal responsibilty for that choice, and is declaring that they know the liquid is very hot.

(About those 700 burns, including full thickness burns: full thickness burns are a medical emergency. They can be fatal. They require specialist medical attention involving painful procedures that leave scarring and possibly loss of function. McDonalds made a careful conscious choice that allowing these burns to continue and then settling costs out of court was preferable to complying with national advice about beveridge temperature. You are asking people to take responsibility for their actions: the jury decided to make McDonalds responsible for that choice.

When I was a kid, I got a pretty decent electric shock from a neighbor's improperly mounted doorbell. The doorbell did not work, so I flipped it over (it was dangling on some wires) and tried to fix it on the spot (as if I knew what I was doing...) and got shocked.

From that moment on, I knew not to touch exposed wires. I knew that it was my own damn fault for touching the wires and getting shocked. My parents got really angry at my neighbors for having exposed wires like that, but I was scolded too for doing something I had no business doing.

The point is if the coffee lady had any common sense she would not have put coffee between her legs (I feel bad for her injuries as any person would, but I still fail to see McDonalds' responsibility here). The worst thing to happen to our judicial system isn't the hot coffee case - it's shifting the onus of personal responsibility to the service or product providers.

edit: I'm speaking strictly about the hot coffee case and ones similar to it. The article goes on about medical cases which are obviously much more complex

The fact that you say that this is a matter of "an extraordinarily small minority of people [who] are unable to make decent decisions"[0] leads me to believe that you still don't understand the details of this specific case - including details pointed out elsewhere in this thread (let alone available elsewhere online).

We're not talking about some hypothetical woman with hypothetically hot coffee from a hypothetical company - we're talking about a specific incident in which the facts are actually very readily available.

[0] You also draw a completely false dichotomy when it comes to "individual liberty and customer choice", since that's actually not the issue that was litigated here. If you want to find out the issue that was actually litigated, I'd invite you to read up on the case to the point where you understand that the temperature of the coffee itself wasn't actually the reason that the jury awarded the punitive damages (the civil damages, yes, but not the punitive damages).