How did we get here?

I t is rare that science owes a debt to law. To lawmakers, surely, such as those who regularly make generous appropriations to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. But law, in the sense of the process and products of litigation? It’s hard to imagine. But this special supplement is deeply in debt to law in just that sense. The funding that supports the research reported on in this special issue owes everything to an unlikely lawsuit. Broin v. Philip Morris, Inc. was filed in 1991, when everybody knew that it was impossible to sue tobacco companies successfully. It was a class action, brought under a Florida court rule modelled on a federal rule that had generally been understood to bar class actions for ‘‘mass torts’’. This particular class action, against all the major cigarette companies, sought damages for illnesses suffered by flight attendants as a result of their exposure to secondhand smoke. This, at a time when the tobacco industry was still getting traction in its defence of smokers’ cases with ‘‘expert’’ witnesses who testified that the causal relation between active smoking and lung cancer had not yet been proven! Yet, to almost everyone’s surprise, the Broin case resisted all industry efforts to prevent it from going to trial. The trial itself, in the summer and fall of 1997, lasted five months and featured pro bono testimony on the effects of secondhand smoke and the misconduct of the tobacco industry from experts, several of whom are represented among the contributors to this supplement. We will never know what the jury thought of the case, since the parties settled while the defence was still presenting its side of the case.