R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company v. Martin

Case Updates

NCLC urged the U.S. Supreme Court to accept review of this case to clarify whether the Due Process Clause prohibits the use of issue preclusion to establish elements of a plaintiff’s claims where it cannot be shown that the issues being given preclusive effect were actually decided in a prior proceeding. This case is one of approximately 8,000 pending individual personal injury claims filed in the wake of the decision of the Florida Supreme Court in Engle v. Liggett Group, a sprawling class action against the major domestic cigarette manufacturers. When the Florida Supreme Court decertified the Engle class, it nevertheless upheld certain findings rendered by the class action jury and stated that those findings should receive ‘res judicata’ effect in follow-on cases brought by individual class members.

According to NCLC’s brief, that ruling adversely affects the fundamental right of American businesses to defend themselves when they are sued. The lower court’s perfunctory rulings approve the use of collateral estoppel to take broad categories of argument off the table at trial, based entirely on a general verdict that could have endorsed any number of alternative theories of liability, without any assurance that the issues precluded in subsequent trials were actually and necessarily decided by the general verdict. The rulings below have also cleared the way for a new breed of mass-tort litigation, in which a highly generic, all-encompassing “issues phase” is tried, implicating any number of manufacturers and any number of products over a multi-decade time span. Under the reasoning of the courts below, any such proceeding resulting in a general verdict against the defendants could be used to foreclose litigation over basic liability issues as to all manufacturers and all products for the entire time period – even if, in the most extreme example, the jury’s general verdict is premised on a single flaw in a single model of one manufacturer’s product at one moment in time. If allowed to stand, the rulings below could dramatically transform the law of issue preclusion and improperly increase the liability exposure for all companies doing business in the United States.