Susan Rosenblatt

In his 36 years as a lawyer, Stanley M. Rosenblatt has earned a reputation in south Florida legal circles as a passionate and pugnacious litigator. Now, at age 60, he is involved in the trial of his life. Jury selection began Monday and is expected to last at least another week in a suit that Rosenblatt has filed against the tobacco industry on behalf of 60,000 U.S. flight attendants.

In his 36 years as a lawyer, Stanley M. Rosenblatt has earned a reputation in south Florida legal circles as a passionate and pugnacious litigator. Now, at age 60, he is involved in the trial of his life. Jury selection began Monday and is expected to last at least another week in a suit that Rosenblatt has filed against the tobacco industry on behalf of 60,000 U.S. flight attendants.

Dr. Howard Engle, a Florida pediatrician and lifelong smoker whose tobacco lawsuit resulted in the largest punitive damage award in U.S. history, died Wednesday at his home in Miami Beach. He was 89. Engle had been in declining health for years from smoking-related ailments, said his attorney Stanley Rosenblatt. Engle made U.S. legal history in 2000 when a Miami jury awarded $145 billion in punitive damages against tobacco companies in Engle's class-action lawsuit.

Ralph Nader's Public Citizen Litigation Group filed a formal challenge Monday to the $300-million settlement in the first class-action case that tested cigarette maker's liability for illnesses allegedly caused by secondhand smoke, contending that the recent agreement is unfair to the plaintiff flight attendants.

Tobacco companies won a big legal victory Friday when a Florida appeals court ruled that damages in a landmark class-action case must be considered one smoker at a time, thus forestalling the risk of a multibillion-dollar punitive-damages award.

Reeling from major West Coast defeats and the threat of a judgment day in Florida, cigarette makers scored a legal victory Tuesday in Brooklyn, N.Y., where a state court jury ruled tobacco companies were not to blame for the lung cancer of a longtime smoker. The verdict in the case of Clyde Anderson, a former laborer who lives in Brooklyn, turned on the unexpected finding that his cancer was not linked to more than 30 years of smoking.

In a surprise deal with anti-tobacco lawyers, three tobacco companies Monday agreed to forfeit $709 million even if they succeed in reversing an astronomical damage award in a class-action case in Florida. The agreement is essentially an insurance policy, guaranteeing the right of the three cigarette makers--Philip Morris Cos., Lorillard and Liggett Group--to appeal last year's $144.8-billion verdict in the Engle case, even if a controversial cap on the size of appeal bonds is ruled invalid. R.

Big Tobacco girded itself against a new kind of legal threat Monday as jury selection began in Miami in the first class-action suit by smokers ever to go to trial. The lawsuit, called Engle vs. R.J. Reynolds, seeks damages for as many as 200,000 Florida smokers who allegedly suffered disease or death because of their addiction to smoking.

The Florida Supreme Court lifted a cloud over the tobacco industry Thursday when it refused to reinstate a crushing $144.8-billion class-action verdict that had been overturned by a state appeals court. The long-awaited ruling came in the landmark Engle class-action case, filed on behalf of up to 700,000 Florida smokers who blamed tobacco-related illnesses on an industry conspiracy to hide the risks and addictiveness of smoking.

Lawyers for the tobacco industry and 60,000 U.S. flight attendants are girding for the start this week of a historic trial that will test the industry's liability for illnesses supposedly caused by secondhand smoke. The case, known as Broin vs. Philip Morris, is the first to seek damages for bystanders supposedly harmed by smoke from other people's cigarettes.

Cigarette makers suffered a major legal defeat Wednesday in Miami, where a jury found them liable for illnesses in a huge class of current and former Florida smokers numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The jury of four men and two women voted unanimously to reject the industry's contention that there is no definitive scientific proof that smoking causes disease and that it is not addictive.