Hello, I’m Zhan Qingyun.

Recent episodes have spent considerable time on what law is, why we obey it, our relationship with it, and the purposes it seeks to realize.

We emphasized that every system and judgment is imperfect and rules change over time. Yet the certainty law supplies as shared rules and final arbiter is irreplaceable.

That account remains incomplete. Because American precedent is our principal source, we must address classic moments when its legal history broke or challenged certainty.

The best-known example may be the 1960s civil-rights movement. Its slogan, “an unjust law is no law,” challenged segregation’s settled certainty.

Sometimes social justice and public welfare are achieved by breaking certainty. Nothing is absolute.

Most of us accept rule of law as good and as a goal of modern Chinese development. We want conflict resolved legally, peacefully, and by rules rather than cycles of vengeance.

But legal societies have problems too.

The absence of rule of law is disastrous, but can there be too much law? Many Americans believe litigation is overused or abused in the United States.

Americans readily say “See you in court” and take all kinds of problems before judges.

Here are two lawsuits I personally would never bring. Decide what you think.

In 1992, Stella Liebeck, an elderly woman, bought something from a McDonald’s drive-through. These windows are common at American roadside fast-food restaurants and now appear in China too.

You order by microphone from the car, queue, collect prepared food at the window, and drive away.

Liebeck ordered coffee, held the cup between her legs, removed the lid to add cream and sugar, and accidentally spilled it. Six percent of her skin suffered third-degree burns, and she sued McDonald’s.

Why could she sue when no employee spilled it and she had already taken possession?

She alleged the coffee was dangerously hot: 82–88°C under McDonald’s chain-wide standard.

A beverage at that temperature can cause third-degree burns.

She alleged negligence, a tort term meaning legally culpable carelessness.

McDonald’s failure to guard against an easily foreseeable burn constituted that negligence.

The jury awarded $2.86 million, later reduced to $640,000—still astonishing for spilling a purchased coffee and receiving compensation worth millions of renminbi.