Sadly for the Florida plaintiffs from the decertified Engle v. Liggett Group, Inc. class-action lawsuit, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals declared yesterday that previous rulings from the original lawsuit could not be used alone to prove that the RJ Reynolds tobacco company (and other cigarette makers, by implication) was negligent for selling “defective” products — cigarettes — and conspired to hide the defective aspects which did indeed cause lung cancer and other diseases. The thousands of plaintiffs who tried to file a class-action suit against the tobacco company must now bring individual cases, which could prove very costly and arduous.
ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan was quoted in a Winston Salem Journal article as saying the ruling could lead some plaintiffs to drop out of the litigation. "Here's another example of the tobacco industry knowing how to make lemonade out of the lemons they are handed," she told the paper.