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ANTISMOKING CLIMATE INSPIRES SUITS BY THE DYING  

Rose Cipollone started smoking in 1942, when she was 16 years old. Each morning, on her way to Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, she bought three Chesterfields at the candy store near the el station at 116th Street and Third Avenue. Smoking them, she would later explain, made her feel like the movie stars she read about in True Story and Photoplay.

''I thought that it was cool to smoke, and grown up, and I was going to be glamorous or beautiful,'' she would recall. ''I thought I would be Joan Crawford or Bette Davis.''

Forty-two years after she began smoking, Mrs. Cipollone, who had lived in Little Ferry with her husband since 1961, died of lung cancer. For most of that time, she had smoked more than a pack of cigarettes a day - first Chesterfield; later, as fashions changed, L & M, Virginia Slims, Parliament and True.

Although Mrs. Cipollone is dead, a lawsuit that she brought, against three of the country's largest cigarette manufacturers, remains very much alive in Federal District Court in Newark. . . .

A sure sign of growing interest in these lawsuits, legal experts say, is the increasing willingness of lawyers to take on the cases. The expenses of the lawyers can be recouped only if they prevail in court or get settlements.

In addition to the cases in New Jersey, there are already suits in New York, Texas, Tennessee, Massachusetts, West Virginia and several other states, and many more seem certain to to be filed if even one of the present suits prove successful.

''You can use whatever analogy you want - flies to honey, vampires to blood - but we've got a glut of lawyers out there just looking for someone to sue,'' said John F. Banzhaf 3d, a professor at George Washington University Law School.

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If there were any hazard in cigarettes manufactured by this defendant, which this defendant denies, Rose D. Cipollone was on notice of the same and able to protect herself. If Rose D. Cipollone consumed cigarettes, she did so solely by reason of her own choice.
Liggett Group court papers in the Cipollone case. It's always instructive to look back once in awhile. This 1985 NYT article is a perceptive look at Cipollone and the litigation climate of the day.