New paper showing how the tobacco companies manipulated the American Law Institute to shape tort law
November 4, 2012
We just published a new paper, "Tobacco Industry Influence on the American Law Institute’s Restatements of Torts and Implications for Its Conflict of Interest Policies," in the Iowa Law Review showing how the tobacco companies quietly shaped influential policy documents to win sympathetic legal interpretations in products liability cases for decades. Many of these policies are still in force today.
Here is a summary of the paper:
November 4, 2012
November 1, 2012
California Governor Jerry Brown recently vetoed Assembly Bill 217, which would have made nursing homes smokefree," ignoring the mountain of evidence that secondhand smoke kills. Our new meta-analysis, published in Circulation, means that this veto will mean more elderly California's showing up in emergency rooms with heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks and other cardiac and respiratory emergencies. Many will die.
His veto message uses language straight out of tobacco industry propaganda, he talks about "accommodating" residents' "preferences" to smoke, concluding, "Let's rely on ... the facility and its residents and employees to figure out which accommodations work or don't work."
Here is what Philip Morris says on its corporate web site about the issue:
October 26, 2012
October 23, 2012
Heikki Hiilamo, Eric Crosbie and I just published our paper, "The evolution of health warning labels on cigarette packs: the role of precedents, and tobacco industry strategies to block diffusion" in Tobacco Control.
ABSTRACT
Objective To analyse the evolution and diffusion of health warnings on cigarette packs around the world, including tobacco industry attempts to block this diffusion.
Methods We analysed tobacco industry documents and public sources to construct a database on the global evolution and diffusion of health warning labels from 1966 to 2012, and also analysed industry strategies.