Suing the tobacco and lead pigment industries
Subtitle: government litigation as public health prescription
By: Donald G. Gifford.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Ann Arbor
Language: eng
Number of pages: 309
ISBN-13: 9780472117147; 9780472021864
Subjects: Products liability -- United States; Products liability -- Tobacco -- United States; Lead based paint -- Law and legislation -- United States; Government litigation -- United States; Class actions (Civil procedure) -- United States
Description: "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 sought compensation from 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 compensation for the funds spent on public health crises as well as stricter regulation of harmful products." "Gifford explains that courts, through their refusal to expand traditional tort claims, have resisted litigation as a solution to product-caused public health problems, and that even if the government was to prevail, the remedy in such litigation is unlikely to be effective." "By shifting the power to regulate products and to remediate public health problems from the legislature to the state attorney general, parens patriae litigation also raises broader, more essential concerns about the appropriate allocation of powers among the branches of government." --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The tort system's early responses to product-caused diseases; title: The morning after the consumer century; title: Product-caused diseases confront the law of the Iron Horse; title: The first wave of challenges to the individual causation requirement; title: The seeds of government-sponsored litigation; title: A failure of democratic processes? : legislative responses to the public health problems caused by tobacco and lead pigment; title: The government as plaintiff : parens patriae actions against tobacco and gun manufacturers; title: Judicial rejection of recovery for collective harm : public nuisance and the Rhode Island paint litigation; title: Do litigation remedies cure product-caused public health problems?; title: Impersonating the legislature : state attorneys general and parens patriae products litigation.