"The topic, how tort law evolved over time into a system that allowed, for a moment at least, a parens patriae form of massive litigation against corporations, is exceedingly interesting and important. Gifford's treatment of this topic is highly informative, engaging, insightful, very current, and wise." ---David Owen, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Law, and Director of Tort Law Studies, University of South Carolina In Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries, legal scholar Donald G. Gifford recounts the transformation of tort litigation in response to the challenge posed by victims of 21st-century public health crises who seek compensation from the product manufacturers. Class action litigation promised a strategy for documenting collective harm, but an increasingly conservative judicial and political climate limited this strategy. Then, in 1995, Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore initiated a parens patriae action on behalf of the state against cigarette manufacturers. Forty-five other states soon filed public product liability actions, seeking both compensation for the funds spent on public health crises and the regulation of harmful products. Gifford finds that courts, through their refusal to expand traditional tort claims, have resisted litigation as a solution to product-caused public health problems. Even if the government were to prevail, the remedy in such litigation is unlikely to be effective. Gifford warns, furthermore, that by shifting the powers to regulate products and to remediate public health problems from the legislature to the state attorney general, parens patriae litigation raises concerns about the appropriate allocation of powers among the branches of government. Donald G. Gifford is the Edward M. Robertson Research Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law.

A history and critique of public health litigation

Our society has a technology problem. Many want to disconnect from screens but can't help themselves. These days we spend more time online than ever. Some turn to self-help-measures to limit their usage, yet repeatedly fail, while parents feel particularly powerless to help their children. Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies shows us a way out. Rather than blaming users, the book shatters the illusion that we autonomously choose how to spend our time online. It shifts the moral responsibility and accountability for solutions to corporations. Drawing lessons from the tobacco and food industries, the book demonstrates why government regulation is necessary to curb technology addiction. It describes a grassroots movement already in action across courts and legislative halls. Groundbreaking and urgent, Unwired provides a blueprint to develop this movement for change, to one that will allow us to finally gain control.

In recent years, tobacco politics has been a multi-layered issue fraught with significant legal, commercial, and public policy implications. From the outset, Martha A. Derthick′s Up in Smoke took a nuanced look at tobacco politics in a new era of "adversarial legalism" and the consequences, both intended and unintended, of the MSA (Master Settlement Agreement). Now, with a brand new 3rd edition, the book returns to "ordinary politics" and the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act which gave the FDA broad authority to regulate both the manufacture and marketing of tobacco products. Derthick shows our political institutions working as they should, even if slowly, with partisanship and interest group activity playing their part in putting restraints on cigarette smoking.

Public Opinion, Public Policy, and Smoking tracks Americans’ changing attitudes about cigarette smoking over the last century. With data from more than five thousand public and privately conducted polls, this book carefully examines how Americans came to understand the health risks of smoking; how the tobacco industry sought to reframe smoking; and how public opinion support for tobacco control affected lawsuits, elections, and public policies. This book tests several well-known linkage models that connect public opinion with public policy. It shows that conventional wisdom about public opinion and tobacco control policy is often mistaken. This book offers the first in-depth look at American public opinion and cigarette smoking during the last century.

In Public Nuisance, Linda Mullenix describes the landscape of 21st century mass tort litigation involving public harms – including lead paint, opioids, firearms, e-cigarettes, climate change, and environmental pollution – and the novel theory of public nuisance that lawyers and local governments have used to receive compensation from those who have created public nuisances. The book surveys conflicting judicial decisions rooted in common law and statutory interpretation and evaluates the competing arguments for and against the expansion of public nuisance law. Mullenix argues that that the development of public nuisance theory is part of the historical arc of mass tort litigation and suggests a middle approach to new public nuisance law, namely that we should embrace the common law and legislated public nuisance statutes.