Business Notes

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.

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.