Tobacco.org

• Tobacco Companies Sue to Loosen New Limits 

Most of the nation's largest tobacco companies filed a free-speech lawsuit on Monday in Kentucky to try to stop a landmark federal law from curtailing their marketing or forcing them to print graphic warnings on the top half of cigarette packages next year.

The first lawsuit against the new law, which was signed in June by President Obama, is likely to end up before the United States Supreme Court, lawyers on all sides of the issue said on Monday. In 2001, the Supreme Court rejected outdoor advertising restrictions in tobacco regulations in Massachusetts, ruling 6-3 that it violated free speech rights.

"The case is likely to proceed quickly," Floyd Abrams, a constitutional lawyer who is representing the Lorillard Tobacco Company, said in a phone interview on Monday. "Tobacco is a legal product for adults, and the Supreme Court has said that the industry has an interest which the First Amendment protects to communicate information about its products, and adults have the right to receive that information."

Anti-tobacco lawyers said the federal legislation was carefully worded to withstand just such a legal test.

"It was perfectly clear there was going to be a constitutional challenge, and I think it will survive the challenge," Richard A. Daynard, a professor at the Northeastern School of Law in Boston and chairman of its Tobacco Products Liability Project, said in a phone interview. . . .

Clifford E. Douglas, a lawyer and executive director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network, countered, "If there's any commercial speech that it is constitutional to restrict, it's the type of marketing covered in this legislation." . . .

David M. Sylvia, a spokesman for Altria, said on Monday that the company has its own free-speech concerns about some parts of the law, "but at this point in time we're not commenting on our strategy about how we're handling that." He said Altria had not yet reviewed the lawsuit.

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