Word: tobacco
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Ferguson has had access to all the surviving Rothschild archives, including the family's vast private correspondence, which fills 135 boxes. He sorts through the intricacies of their business deals: financing governments, bill brokering, working the international bullion market, trading in American cotton and tobacco, Spanish mercury and Russian copper. The legerdemain of speculative finance in another century is sometimes occult material, but Ferguson manages it well...
...light of the lucrative settlements that many states have reached with tobacco companies, it is no surprise that the city of Chicago is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from another societal cancer, the country's leading gun makers. The city has charged them with creating a public hazard by flooding markets with their product and by using lenient standards in distribution control. As a result, prosecutors contend, gun makers have assured that criminals have access to firearms...
This suit should spark debate about whether state-sponsored class action suits are causing the legislative branch to cede its regulatory responsibilities to the court system. In the case of tobacco litigation, states accused the cigarette makers of evading legal regulation by concealing the effects of smoking...
...although lawsuits may be politically expedient, they can never take the place of law. Monetary victories in court do not ensure that companies will reform their immoral practices, as the tobacco companies have demonstrated...
...city of Chicago will be successful only if its case reinvigorates the national demand for gun control legislation as the tobacco lawsuits did for non-smoking laws. To win the fight against gun makers and other apparent public threats, regulation must remain a legislative process rather than a judicial one. Alex M. Carter '00 is a history and literature concentrator in Dunster House. His column appears on alternate Mondays...