Publications
PLL #17: Appellate court rulings in Florida (class actions) and Pennsylvania (spoliation) recently caught my eye
In a July 6, 2006 decision in the seemingly never-ending tobacco wars the Florida Supreme Court in Engle v. Liggett Group, Inc. managed to include some good news for each side. Industry defendants were pleased by the Court’s decision affirming an intermediate appellate court’s reversal of a July 2000 jury verdict awarding a class of 700,000 Florida smokers $145 billion ($207,142 each!) in punitive damages. The Court held that individualized facts made it unfeasible to decide liability and damages on a class basis and decertified the class for those purposes. On the other hand, the Court found that certain issues—such as whether cigarettes are defective, addictive and a cause of a number of major diseases—could be decided on a class basis and that jury findings on such issues adverse to the industry defendants would be res judicata (i.e., already decided) in subsequent individual trials.