Up in Smoke: From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics

In recent years, tobacco politics has been a multi-layered issue fraught with significant legal, commercial, and public policy implications. From the outset, Martha A. Derthick's Up in Smoke took a nuanced look at tobacco politics in a new era of "adversarial legalism" and the consequences, both intended and unintended, of the MSA (Master Settlement Agreement). Now, with a brand new 3rd edition, the book returns to "ordinary politics" and the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act which gave the FDA broad authority to regulate both the manufacture and marketing of tobacco products. Derthick shows our political institutions working as they should, even if slowly, with partisanship and interest group activity playing their part in putting restraints on cigarette smoking.

Table of Contents:
A New Way of Regulating Tobacco The Ordinary Politics of Legislation Ordinary Torts: Litigation Before It Was Substituted for Legislation The Drive for FDA Regulation The New Wave of Litigation The Changed Context of Policymaking The 1997 Settlement Dies in Congress The FDA Regulations Die in Court The Master Settlement Agreement of 1998 The Aftermath of the MSA After Litigation, A Return to Legislation Ordinary Politics versus Adversarial Legalism Chronology of Cigarette Regulation

About the Author :
Martha Derthick retired in 1999 from the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, where she was the Julia Allen Cooper Professor. She is the author of numerous books on American government, including: Dilemmas of Scale in America's Federal Democracy (editor, 1999); Agency Under Stress: The Social Security Administration in American Government (1990); The Politics of Deregulation (with Paul J. Quirk, 1985); and Policymaking for Social Security (1979), which won the Kammerer Prize of the American Political Science Association as the best book of the year on American public policy. Before going to the University of Virginia, she was for twelve years a member of the Governmental Studies Program of The Brookings Institution, and was the program's director between 1978 and 1983. She has also taught at Dartmouth College, Stanford University, Harvard University, and Boston College.

Review :
"The book is the gold standard for this type of text—it’s clear, it makes a strong argument about reliance on courts to make policy, and it says something about the state of American democracy." "I have found this to be an excellent book for my course, accessible to an undergraduate audience and well-written." "I think Up in Smoke does an excellent job of showing the multiple avenues of policy development in the American context. It can be used to show the power of interest groups, the nature of litigation, and the variations in normal politics over time. The structure of the book fits naturally with how one might discuss this in class." "The book is exceptionally lucid and captures the confiscatory logic of the Master Settlement AGreement brilliantly and shows that it is indeed a pathology of federalism. The book is brilliant at telling a story and unveiling important lessons about adversarial legalism and its downside."