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Introduction
Dozens of state attorneys general have filed lawsuits against cigarette companies to recoup costs of smoking to the states. Do the states have a legitimate claim? 
Should cigarette manufacturers pay tort liability to smokers for the harm caused by cigarettes?
Do you support legislation along the lines of the proposed national resolution to settle the ongoing cigarette litigation?
Rejoinders Table of Contents |
HANSON AND VISCUSI DISPUTE THE TRUE COSTS OF SMOKING
Bulletin Editor Nancy Waring asked Professor Jon Hanson and Professor W. Kip Viscusi, two prominent economic theorists in the debate on cigarettes, to write brief answers to three key questions. Each was then shown the other’s answers and asked to write a 200-word rejoinder.
Professor Jon Hanson
teaches Torts, Products Liability Theory, and Corporations. He
and his coauthors detail many of the arguments sketched here in
two law review articles: "The Costs of Cigarettes: The
Economic Case for Ex Post Incentive-Based Regulation," with
Kyle Logue, 107 Yale Law Journal 1163 (1998); and
"Smokers’ Compensation: Toward a Blueprint for Federal
Regulation of Cigarette Manufacturers," Symposium Issue:
"The Tobacco Wars," with Kyle Logue and Michael Zamore
’99, 22 Southern Illinois University Law Journal 519 (1998).
Professor Hanson has testified with respect to cigarette
regulation before the U.S. Senate Democratic Task Force on
Tobacco and the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor & Human
Resources. Last summer, he organized the Harvard Law School
Conference on the Proposed Tobacco Settlement, "Should Tort
Law Be on the Table?"
W. Kip Viscusi is the
John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics and director of
the School’s Program on Empirical Legal Studies. He is the
author of Smoking: Making the Risky Decision (Oxford University
Press, 1992) and numerous articles on smoking. He has testified
as a consultant on environmental tobacco smoke to the U.S. EPA
and has served as an expert on a wide range of smoking issues for
defense law firms.