Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...however, the anti-tobacco forces are taking a page from the cigarette makers' own playbook. "This king-of-the-mountain game they've played is a game that would be played by a schoolyard bully," says Northeastern University law professor Richard Daynard, chair of the Tobacco Products Liability Project, which conducts research for anti-tobacco lawsuits. "After you've beaten a couple of kids up, nobody dares take you on. But the moment the kids say, 'We can take him if we band together,' the bully is finished." It helps too that the new legal strategy of states filing third...
...tobacco, which has traditionally deployed veritable armies of attorneys from such white-shoe firms as King & Spalding in Atlanta, Covington & Burling in Washington and the Kansas City firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, this new assault amounts to a dangerous game of dominoes. "The moment they lose one the other states are going to have to file," says Daynard. "Imagine being the attorney general of a state and saying while my neighboring attorney general is getting $400 million in restitution for the taxpayers of his state, I am not going to file as a matter of principle. At that point...
...Mississippi, attorney general Mike Moore and attorney Scruggs are leading the charge with a legal theory, never before deployed in anti-tobacco suits, called "unjust enrichment." Rather than suing on behalf of specific sick individuals, a strategy that has yet to succeed, the states are claiming they are tobacco's hit-and-run victims, stuck paying out billions of taxpayer dollars each year to treat the array of health problems wrought by smoking. In other words, says one frustrated tobacco-industry lawyer, "the states are taking the position that they don't have to prove anything except the company sold...
That would explain the vehemence with which tobacco is fighting back--in some cases pre-emptively. Industry lawyers have already filed suits trying to block the possible Maryland and Texas cases. In West Virginia, Governor W. Gaston Caperton, with the support of several of his own judicial appointees, has for now effectively scuttled that action by suing his own attorney general, Darrell McGraw, on the grounds that he did not have the authority to file a Medicaid suit. A few weeks ago, Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice, following Caperton's example, filed a similar suit against attorney general Moore. Fordice, though...
...tobacco wars may be hottest in Florida right now. In the last five minutes of the last day of the 1994 session, the state legislature overwhelmingly--and according to some, unwittingly--passed Senate Bill 2110, a Medicaid amendment that holds the tobacco industry responsible for the estimated $300 million to $800 million a year the state pays to treat tobacco-related illnesses and that allows lawsuits to collect these funds to use statistical evidence compiled by the Centers for Disease Control. "Profound sneak attack," charges one tobacco lobbyist. The tobacco industry and some associated industries, like U.S. Sugar, filed suit...