Influence of Legal Context on Tobacco Industry Behavior

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The investigators propose to examine the evidence demonstrating how legal context has influenced tobacco industry conduct related to smoking and health. Data sources will include electronic and depository collections of internal tobacco industry documents including approximately 80 boxes of newly available deprivileged documents which have not been indexed. In addition, subjectively and objectively coded documents and substantial litigation-related resources are provided by a major tobacco litigation law firm. A publicly available database-driven document collection and related series of analyses focusing on how legal context determines tobacco industry action on smoking and health will be submitted to peer-reviewed public health or medical journals. The Research Aims that document research and analyses will focus on include: (1) How liability concerns led to the repression of "safer" tobacco products; (2) The interplay of lawyers, legal doctrine and the client in the tobacco context and the implications of these relationships as they relate to decades of tobacco industry concealment of information on smoking and health; (3) Lawyer control of internal and external research within each company and among companies acting in concert; (4) Legal ethics of attorneys representing the industry and use of aggressive litigation tactics to frustrate public health objectives, and (5) Describe what role industry lawyers may have played in creating laws that protect the companies (e.g., tobacco lawyers participation in drafting of the Restatement of Torts (2d)'s proclamation that "good tobacco is not defective" or the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, or the legislation to immunize tobacco companies from liability). The analyses and supporting documents will serve as a predictor of industry behavior in response to mounting legal pressures.