"Smoke Signals: The Changing Landscape of the Practice, Financing and Ethics of Civil Litigation in the Wake of the Tobacco Wars"-Seventh Annual Tort Law and Social Policy Symposium
Sponsored by DePaul University College of Law, 04/05/2001One of the seminal events in recent American civil litigation history came in November 1998, when the five giants of cigarette manufacturing in the United States agreed to settle pending cases mounted by the Attorneys General of 46 States, the District of Columbia and the five United States Territories. This so called Master Settlement Agreement obligated the cigarette manufacturers to, among other things, pay the States more than $200 billion over 25 years and reform the way cigarettes are marketed in America.
The states were assisted in mounting and winning this litigation by a group of private practitioners who had, for the most part, taken the case on a contingency fee basis and stood to gain handsomely from the settlement reached. In consequence of these events, State coffers have begun to swell with payments from the tobacco companies, and successful private counsel have begun to harvest perhaps the richest rewards ever secured by American lawyers.
The impact and implication of these events remain to be sorted out. The goal of the Seventh Annual Clifford Symposium is to facilitate that sorting process by exploring the tobacco wars' impact on the practice of law, the financing of future civil litigation, the relationship between State Attorneys General and the plaintiffs bar, the application of established ethical prinicipals, and the worldwide legal scene.
The Clifford Tort Law and Social Policy Symposium
In 1994, Robert A. Clifford endowed the country's first Chair in Tort Law and Social Policy. The endowment supports faculty research and teaching as well as sponsoring an annual seminar on timely issues related to the law of torts and how it impacts society.
