The tobacco industry will thereby self-insure against the injuries it inflicts and continue its course of destructive conduct. There will be no genuine improvement in the nation's health. Nor will there be a comprehensive national policy concerning tobacco. Indeed, part of the companies' motive in gathering the States into a single settlement may have been precisely to avoid a comprehensive resolution of health issues. The essence of litigation in our system focuses entirely on the case and controversy between the individual litigants and limits the resolution to their particularized grievances.
Tobacco litigation is no different.
What is different about tobacco litigation, however, is that the potential claimants are so numerous, the scope of the offending conduct so vast and the resources of the defendants so huge, that conventional litigation is simply inadequate to capture and contain the issues or assure appropriate relief. It thus fails both as a policy and a compensatory vehicle. In truth, tobacco litigation is poised midway between the destruction of a nation's health, on the one hand, and the destruction of a major industry, on the other. These are matters of legislative, not adjudicative, dimensions. To return to the state of Oregon for a moment, there simply was no way that Judge Anna Brown could possibly police the misconduct or noncompliance of the tobacco companies in the agreement she approved.