WHEN Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old grandmother, sued McDonald’s after scalding herself with hot coffee in 1992, she became the butt of countless jokes. When a jury awarded her $2.7m in punitive damages, the case was held up as an example of frivolous lawsuits and of juries run amok.

In fact the case was less clear-cut. Mrs Liebeck, who needed skin grafts to treat third-degree burns, sued only when the fast-food chain declined to pay all her medical expenses. During the trial it emerged that McDonald’s served its coffee far hotter than home-brewed java. The jury also heard there were 700 other instances of bad burns from McDonald’s coffees served too hot. The jury’s suggested punitive award of $2.7m was roughly the equivalent of two days’ worth of coffee sales. The judge reduced the damages to $480,000. The case was later settled for an undisclosed amount.

Mrs Liebeck’s case became a rallying cry for tort reform, or “tort de-reform” as Ralph Nader puts it. Tort law allows anyone with an injury to seek remedy in court with a trial by jury. It covers a wide range of issues, from product liability to pollution and from workplace safety to police brutality. Tort law became a battleground in the 1990s, when businesses became exasperated with eye-watering damages awarded by juries and moved to have laws changed and unfriendly judges removed. Mr Nader, a consumer-rights advocate and one-time presidential candidate, says the tort-reform lobby has now made it too difficult for people to get their day in court. His response is one of the strangest museums in the country: a shrine to the joy of tort law.

The American Museum of Tort Law uses cartoon graphics to explain complicated lawsuits over asbestos and tobacco. Interactive monitors running old news reports show precedent-setting cases, like Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s lawsuit against a photographer, which placed limits on what paparazzi could do. A room of killer toys, featuring pointy lawn darts, is a reminder of how dangerous playthings used to be. An antique jukebox tells the tale of how a rat helped trigger a fire in 1949, which killed a worker cleaning a coin-operated machine with petrol.

The museum is in Mr Nader’s hometown of Winsted, Connecticut, a struggling mill town with a population of 11,000. Its centrepiece is a shiny red 1963 Chevrolet Corvair, the focus of Mr Nader’s 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed”. The book led to congressional hearings and a string of car-safety laws. Mr Nader hopes the museum will become a resource for students as well as a tourist draw. Early visitors included a high-court judge from India and students from China. America’s trial lawyers will hope that it also improves the reputation of tort law: in many states the number of tort cases has declined.