After spilling a cup of drive-through coffee in her lap in 1994, Stella Liebeck became a national punchline, fodder for cheap yuks by the likes of pabulum-spooning late-night talk-show hosts. Probably because they, unlike the jurors in the case, never got to see pictures of the thick, necrotic scorch marks on Liebeck's inner thighs. But guess what? The joke's pretty much been on the rest of us. Because Liebeck—a mild-mannered grandmother who died several years ago—also wound up as a rallying cry for one of the most insidious phrases in modern political history: "tort reform." Susan Saladoff's documentary Hot Coffee traces Liebeck's case and several others in an emotionally sapping exposé of how corporate interests have spent the past 20 years systematically de-fanging the civil court system in America. by Denis C. Theriault