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- <text id=91TT0751>
- <title>
- Apr. 08, 1991: Business Notes:Litigation
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Apr. 08, 1991 The Simple Life
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- BUSINESS, Page 55
- Business Notes
- LITIGATION
- Where There's Smoke...
- </hdr><body>
- <p> When Rose Cipollone was an impressionable 1940s teenager, a
- smoldering cigarette in the hand of a glamorous starlet seemed
- to sum up sophistication. Before she died of lung cancer in
- 1984, some 15,000 packs later, Cipollone and her husband filed
- suit against three cigarette manufacturers, claiming that
- intense advertising and industry health claims had drawn her
- into a deadly nicotine habit. Last week the Supreme Court agreed
- to hear the case. However the high court rules, the result will
- deeply affect the enormous tobacco industry.
- </p>
- <p> Cipollone v. Liggett Group Inc. focuses on Congress's 1965
- decision to require health warnings on cigarette packages.
- Tobacco companies argue that the labeling rule shields them from
- liability suits by pre-empting state personal-injury laws.
- Cipollone's attorney Marc Edell, representing her son Thomas,
- responds that "Congress never intended to prohibit suits that
- attack the inadequacy of the warning or the advertising
- practices of the cigarette manufacturers." At stake: potentially
- billions of dollars in damages from similar suits.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-