They \u201cknew and should have known that such hot beverages posed a great hazard of causing just this type of incident and injuries\u201d.<\/p>\n
Roger Dreyer, a personal injury attorney in Sacramento who is representing the Burns family, said the youngster has been left with permanent scars from the incident, which happened two years ago.<\/p>\n
He said that while people going to ski resorts assume a level of risk because of the sport, this case is different.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not assuming they\u2019ll cook the hot chocolate to a temperature that\u2019s not consumable to a human being,\u201d he said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for Vail Resorts, the company that owns Heavenly Mountain, told AFP it was unable to comment on pending litigation.<\/p>\n
Lawsuits that claim hot drinks are too hot are not uncommon in the litigious United States.<\/p>\n
Last year, Starbucks was ordered to pay a customer US$50 million ($86m) for an injury related to a cup of tea.<\/p>\n
That ruling was followed by at least two lawsuits lodged against the company, claiming drivers had suffered injuries when drinks had slopped in their laps.<\/p>\n
A landmark legal ruling against McDonald\u2019s in New Mexico in 1994 established something of a precedent for Americans suing fast food companies when 79-year-old Stella Liebeck was awarded over US$2.8 million after spilling hot coffee on herself.<\/p>\n
Although the award was reduced on appeal, the case has often been cited as an example of the need to reform US tort law.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They \u201cknew and should have known that such hot beverages posed a great hazard of causing just this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337139,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[138,224,10712,2109,51584,111,139,69,531,25290,3235,69329,133651,2846,6173,3040,6736],"class_list":["post-337138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-chocolate","tag-claiming","tag-family","tag-hot","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-resort","tag-ski","tag-sold","tag-sue","tag-suing","tag-them","tag-too","tag-us","tag-was"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}