A handful of famous tort cases set the rules American courts still use to decide who owes a duty of care, when a product’s maker is liable for the harm it causes, and how far a jury can go in punishing reckless corporate behavior. The seven below, running from a 1928 fireworks explosion on a Long Island train platform to the opioid and talcum powder settlements of the 2020s, are the ones worth knowing, because each one changed something specific about how injured people recover and how courts measure corporate accountability.
Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (1928)
Every negligence case begins with the same threshold question: did the defendant owe a duty to this particular plaintiff? Palsgraf is where that question got its modern answer.
Helen Palsgraf was standing on a train platform when two railroad guards helped a passenger board a moving train and, in the process, knocked a small newspaper-wrapped package out of his hands. The package contained fireworks. It exploded on the rails, and the shockwave toppled a heavy set of scales at the far end of the platform. The scales struck Palsgraf.
Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo, writing for the New York Court of Appeals, held that the railroad owed Palsgraf no duty. The guards could not have known the package was dangerous, and nothing about the scene suggested a risk to someone standing that far away. Without a foreseeable risk to her, there was no negligence toward her, whatever the guards may have done wrong with respect to the man carrying the package.
The rule survived. Courts across the country still use foreseeability to decide whether a negligence claim can even get off the ground: the risks you can reasonably anticipate define the duty you owe.
Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. (1944)
Gladys Escola was stacking bottles of Coca-Cola in a restaurant refrigerator when one of them exploded in her hand, severing blood vessels, nerves, and muscles in her thumb and palm. She could not identify what Coca-Cola’s bottler had done wrong, because she had no access to the factory. Her attorneys argued res ipsa loquitur, Latin for “the thing speaks for itself”: a properly made soda bottle does not spontaneously shatter, and the manufacturer controlled the production process, so a jury could infer negligence from the fact of the explosion alone. The California Supreme Court agreed and upheld her verdict.
What made Escola famous was a concurring opinion. Justice Roger Traynor wrote separately to argue that courts should stop making consumers prove negligence at all in cases like this. If a product is defective and the defect causes injury, Traynor reasoned, the manufacturer should be strictly liable. Manufacturers are best positioned to prevent defects and can spread the cost of occasional injuries through insurance and pricing, where an individual consumer cannot absorb a catastrophic medical bill.
Traynor’s concurrence was not law in 1944. Within two decades, California adopted strict product liability, and most states followed. The modern framework, which recognizes manufacturing defects, design defects, and failure-to-warn defects, traces its intellectual roots to that opinion.
Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co. (1981)
Grimshaw is the case people remember when they picture a company deciding that paying for injuries would be cheaper than fixing a dangerous product. A 1972 Ford Pinto stalled on a California freeway, was rear-ended, and burst into flames when the fuel tank ruptured. The driver, Lilly Gray, died of her burns. Her thirteen-year-old passenger, Richard Grimshaw, survived with severe and disfiguring burns across his face and body.
Trial evidence showed that the Pinto’s fuel tank sat behind the rear axle with only nine or ten inches of crush space, far less than any other American car of its time. Ford’s own crash tests had demonstrated that the fuel system failed in rear-end collisions at speeds as low as 21 miles per hour. Internal engineering memos identified fixes, including rear structural reinforcement, a smoother axle, a better bumper, and additional crush space, that would have cost roughly $15.30 per vehicle and made the tank safe up to 34 to 38 miles per hour. Management chose not to implement them. Those test results and memos had moved up the chain to senior executives before production.
The jury awarded Grimshaw about $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $125 million in punitive damages. The trial judge reduced the punitive award to $3.5 million as a condition of denying Ford’s motion for a new trial. Even at the reduced number, the verdict became the template for how juries respond when internal documents show a manufacturer calculated the cost of injuries and decided to accept them.
Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants (1994)
No tort case has been more misread. Media coverage turned Liebeck into a joke about a woman who sued over spilled coffee. The record tells a different story.
Stella Liebeck, 79, bought coffee at a McDonald’s drive-through in Albuquerque. The car was parked while she added cream and sugar. She spilled the cup in her lap. The coffee, served at 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit, caused third-degree burns over about six percent of her body and lesser burns across roughly 16 percent of her skin overall. She needed skin grafts and spent eight days in the hospital.
In discovery, McDonald’s internal documents showed more than 700 prior burn complaints over the previous decade and a deliberate corporate decision to keep serving coffee at that temperature. The jury found McDonald’s 80 percent responsible, awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages (reduced to $160,000 for Liebeck’s share of fault), and added $2.7 million in punitive damages, a figure tied to about two days of McDonald’s coffee revenue. The trial judge cut the punitive award to $480,000. The parties settled confidentially before the appeal was decided.
The case endures because it shows how documentary evidence of what a company knew, and for how long, can transform an ordinary accident into a product liability case worth millions.
Anderson v. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (1996)
The Hinkley, California case, familiar to many through the film Erin Brockovich, is the touchstone for toxic tort litigation. Residents alleged that Pacific Gas and Electric had contaminated their drinking water with hexavalent chromium, a chemical used in the cooling process at the company’s gas compressor station. The contamination traced back to 1951, when spent chromium leached from unlined wastewater ponds into the groundwater over roughly 15 years. Residents reported cancers, respiratory illness, and other chronic conditions. PG&E conceded that chromium had entered the groundwater but contested the health claims, arguing the science linked hexavalent chromium only to lung and sinus cancers.
Because each resident had different exposure levels, different illnesses, and different lengths of residence in the affected area, the case proceeded as a mass tort rather than a class action, with each plaintiff treated as an individual claimant. In 1996, PG&E settled for $333 million, distributed among about 650 plaintiffs based on the severity and duration of their injuries.
Anderson showed what environmental contamination can cost a company when an entire community is affected and the evidence suggests the problem was known and concealed.
The Constitutional Ceiling on Punitive Damages
The size of punitive awards in cases like Grimshaw raised a question the Supreme Court eventually had to answer: at what point does a punitive verdict grow large enough to violate the defendant’s right to due process? Two decisions supplied the framework courts now use.
BMW of North America v. Gore (1996)
An Alabama jury awarded $2 million in punitive damages against BMW for selling a repainted car as new without disclosure. The actual harm was about $4,000, a ratio of 500 to 1. The Supreme Court struck the award down and announced three guideposts for reviewing punitive damages: the reprehensibility of the conduct, the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages, and the gap between the punitive award and other civil or criminal penalties for similar conduct. BMW’s behavior was purely economic, with no safety risk; the ratio was wildly out of line; and Alabama’s maximum civil penalty for similar deceptive practices was $2,000.
State Farm v. Campbell (2003)
Seven years later, after a Utah jury added $145 million in punitive damages to roughly $1 million in compensatory damages against State Farm, the Court tightened the standard. Few punitive awards above a single-digit ratio to compensatory damages will satisfy due process, the Court held. There is no fixed mathematical rule, and higher ratios may be acceptable when compensatory damages are very small or the conduct especially egregious, but as a practical matter the single-digit guideline now caps most punitive verdicts at nine times compensatory damages. Courts use it routinely to reduce jury awards.
The reductions in Grimshaw and Liebeck, though they predated these decisions, point in the same direction. Juries can still send a message. Judges now have constitutional tools to resize it.
Modern Landmark Cases
The principles set out in the older cases keep driving contemporary litigation, often at a scale the twentieth-century decisions never contemplated.
Johnson v. Monsanto Co. (2018)
Dewayne Johnson, a school groundskeeper with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, became the first plaintiff to take Monsanto to trial over Roundup weed killer. He alleged that the glyphosate-based herbicide caused his cancer and that Monsanto had suppressed evidence of the risk. A San Francisco jury awarded about $289 million, including $250 million in punitive damages. The trial court reduced the punitive portion to roughly $39 million, and the appeals court brought the total judgment to about $20.5 million. The verdict opened the door to thousands of similar claims and ultimately pushed Bayer, which had acquired Monsanto, to set aside billions for Roundup litigation.
The Opioid Settlements
The opioid cases are the largest mass tort in American history. State and local governments sued manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies for their roles in an epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, combining product liability, failure-to-warn, fraud, and public nuisance theories. Most of the litigation has resolved through negotiated settlements rather than individual trials. As of 2026, opioid manufacturers, distributors, and retailers have committed more than $50 billion over 18 years in combined settlements. Participants include Purdue Pharma (which entered bankruptcy), the distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen, and the pharmacy chains Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart. The litigation showed tort law operating as a regulatory tool when agencies failed to prevent widespread harm.
Johnson & Johnson Talcum Powder Litigation
Beginning in the mid-2010s, thousands of plaintiffs alleged that Johnson & Johnson’s talc-based baby powder was contaminated with asbestos and had caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. Internal documents suggested the company may have known about potential contamination in its talc supply as early as the 1950s. In 2018, a Missouri jury awarded $4.69 billion to 22 women who tied their ovarian cancer to the product, one of the largest product liability verdicts on record. The company stopped selling talc-based powder in North America in 2020 and worldwide in 2022, switching to cornstarch. As of early 2026, more than 58,000 lawsuits remain consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation in New Jersey, and the company has pursued a contested bankruptcy strategy to resolve the claims.
Read in sequence, these cases trace a single arc. Palsgraf and Escola set the terms on which an injured person can sue at all. Grimshaw, Liebeck, and Anderson show what juries do when internal corporate records surface. BMW and State Farm set the ceiling on how much a jury can punish. And the Roundup, opioid, and talc cases show the whole framework operating at an industrial scale, with the same evidentiary ingredient, documents showing what the company knew and when, doing most of the work.