Where There's Smoke There's Fire: The Search for Legal Paths to Tobacco-Free Air

Our plain-English summary of Where There's Smoke There's Fire: The Search for Legal Paths to Tobacco-Free Air (1977).

The study

• Published: Columbia Journal of Environmental Law (1977)
• Type of article: Journal article
• Our copy: from Johns-Manville's own medical library. The article is still under copyright, so we describe it here rather than post it.

In plain English

This article is a law review Comment, not a medical or scientific study, and it does not discuss asbestos. It surveyed the legal options open to nonsmokers in the United States who wanted protection from other people's tobacco smoke in public places. Drawing on Surgeon General reports and other published sources, the author described tobacco smoke as air pollution containing carbon monoxide, tar and nicotine. The author examined constitutional claims, including a suit over smoking in the Louisiana Superdome that a federal district court dismissed, and concluded that such claims offered little hope to nonsmokers. The author then reviewed tort theories and an employee's right to a safe workplace. This included a New Jersey case in which a telephone company service representative was granted a permanent injunction to work in an environment free of tobacco smoke. The author judged tort suits uncertain, expensive and piecemeal. The author argued that comprehensive relief lay in legislation, and proposed a statute combining three approaches to regulating smoking. The available text stops partway through the discussion of enforcement.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Law review Comment (legal analysis of court cases, statutes and published reports); not an empirical study
• Who was studied: Nonsmokers in the United States seeking legal protection from tobacco smoke in public places and workplaces; no study subjects
• Exposure: Tobacco smoke (mainstream and sidestream smoke) breathed by nonsmokers, described through cited reports as containing carbon monoxide, tar and nicotine; no asbestos exposure is discussed
• Main results:
  • The author concluded that constitutional claims were unlikely to help nonsmokers obtain protection from tobacco smoke
  • In Gasper v. Louisiana Stadium & Exposition District, a nonsmokers' class action over smoking in the Louisiana Superdome, the federal district court dismissed the suit
  • In Shimp v. New Jersey Bell Telephone Co., the employee (a service representative) was granted a permanent injunction for the right to work in an environment free of tobacco smoke, based on the common law right to a safe workplace
  • The author proposed that a comprehensive no-smoking statute combine three approaches: total prohibition in small places, mandated smoking areas in large places, and optional smoking areas in intermediate places
• The authors' conclusion: The authors concluded that tort actions offered only uncertain, piecemeal relief, and that comprehensive relief seemed to lie in legislation protecting all nonsmokers in public places

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Tort.

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