“Home cooking” in the tobacco cases (by NMC)

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This Washington Post story about the tobacco settlements (mentioned in comments by MississippiLawyer) makes an interesting read in light of recent events. First, there is the description of the Trent Lott-Dickie Scruggs relationship, and how Scruggs called on Lott at a critical moment in the negotiations. Then there’s this. The story notes that Scruggs and his group “would make sure the battle stayed on their home turf – a strategy Scruggs called “home cookin’.” And then it describes how they gave the tobacco companies home cooking:

Every third Tuesday each month, [the trial judge]… heard tobacco motions. Industry lawyers flew in from around the country to sit on plastic chairs and await their turn to step up to a makeshift lectern to argue their points. [The judge]… rarely asked questions, and often simply left without a word.

The tobacco lawyers didn’t have a clue what was on the judge’s mind until they received his rulings in the mail. They were almost all one-sentence statements and read the same way: overruling the industry and sustaining the state.

“Our jaws would drop,” said one industry lawyer. “We’d pick up the phone and say, ‘What in the hell is he up to?’ ” Then they would report the bad news to their tobacco clients – Scruggs had won again.

Cigarette executives say the industry’s legions of big-city litigators were flummoxed by the Mississippi case. “These $500-an-hour company lawyers didn’t understand small southern towns,” said one tobacco industry attorney. “They were bamboozled.”

History was being made by an overworked, inexperienced judge without a law clerk, who also kept up his full docket of probate disputes, land squabbles and juvenile delinquency cases. And the industry’s luck didn’t improve when it appealed Myers’s rulings to higher courts.

When on March 13, 1997, the Mississippi Supreme Court found against the industry on every motion – including Fordice’s assertion that Moore had no authority to file the suit – Philip Morris’s stock sank 8 percent.

 

I’ll note here that the rulings did get affirmed by the Mississippi Supreme Court. But the echoes are still interesting.

UMATTY points out in comments that the whole docket in the tobacco litigation is available online through Delta Computers’ Jackson County Chancery Court docket. Yes, it is–here is the tobacco litigation docket itself. Far too much for me to page through, but there you have it.