• Flight Attendants Medical Research Institute
• FAMRI

It 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.¹ 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, …