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In New Orleans, the widow of an attorney who died of lung cancer vowed to avenge his death by suing the tobacco companies. In Clarksdale, Mississippi, an outraged country lawyer discovered the cost of lung cancer care as his secretary's mother lay dying. In Washington, D.C., a young pediatrician became the first FDA administrator in ninety years to decide nicotine should be regulated as a drug. All three were warned: Don't mess with Big Tobacco.
Then a $9-an-hour law clerk in Louisville, Kentucky, stole thousands of incriminating tobacco company documents. Suddenly, an untouchable industry was under siege. In the vanguard of the attack were the nation's toughest liability lawyers. Thirty-nine states would ultimately join the battle, seeking billions of Medicaid dollars spent on tobacco-related diseases. The costliest civil litigation in history had begun.
The $50 billion tobacco industry had finally met its match. Motivated as much by anger as by agreed, liability lawyers with noms de guerre like "the Asbestos Avenger" and "the Master of Disaster" outflanked and outsmarted the once invincible legal armies of Big Tobacco. In 1994, sixty of these lawyers came together, pooling their talents, their time, and their war chests to launch a ferocious nationwide assault. At the same time, they provided the legal muscle behind the state suits.
Three years later, they had forced the industry to the negotiating table. The result is a $368 billion deal that will eventually change the way Big Tobacco does business.
Cornered is the first full account of this unprecedented legal battle. It uses confidential memos to explain how the companies avoided government regulation and legal redress for so many years. It moves from the early skirmishes in rural Mississippi to strategy sessions in the back rooms of New Orleans restaurants, from a warehouse in England stuffed with 9 million company documents to the corridors of power in the nation's capital.
It follows the whistle-blowers who laid bare the evidence that made the litigation possible, and it winds through the offices of the state attorneys general whose Medicaid lawsuits lent a halo of respectability to the "junkyard dogs" of liability law.
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Previews available in: English
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Cornered: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice
2014, Holt & Company, Henry
in English
1466881585 9781466881587
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Cornered: Big Tobacco At the Bar of Justice
January 15, 1998, Henry Holt & Company
Hardcover
in English
- 1st ed edition
080504292X 9780805042924
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Cornered: big tobacco at the bar of justice
1998, H. Holt
in English
- 1st ed.
080504292X 9780805042924
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [331]-333) and index.
"A Marian Wood book."
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- Created April 1, 2008
- 12 revisions
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