Tobacco Law and Policy is the second version of a database of law review and journal articles relating to tobacco control originally made available through the library website for the William S. Richardson School of Law (WSRSL).  The first incarnation of the database was compiled by WSRSL Professor Mark A. Levin in 2001 with help from law students Tom Kolbe, Brandon Mitsuda, Dawn Nagatani, Kimberly Tsumoto, and Andrew Daisuke Stewart. The current version was compiled by Professor Levin with help from law students Daryl Takeno and John Donovan and law library research staff Lydia D'Addario.  A team at the University of Maryland, students Brooke Courtney and Jodi Chilson under the direction of Kathleen Hoke Dachille, added tobacco law and policy articles in journals in the social sciences and related fields.  The database was last updated August 4, 2008.

Funding for the establishment of Tobacco Law and Policy, an independent website for the database, was provided by the American Cancer Society through the Tobacco Control Legal Consortium, and with cooperation and in-kind support from the University of Maryland School of Law and the William S. Richardson School of Law.

Special thanks to Joots, Inc., joots.com, particularly Matthew Putegnot, for outstanding work in the design and technical engineering of this website.

This database is intended for use as a research tool in tobacco control related law and policy.  Of necessity, decisions have been made to facilitate the database's construction with the risk of occasionally blurring the precision of the results.

Most notably, our editing process removed articles that addressed tobacco control as an ancillary focus.  The most common of these were articles that address how tobacco liability litigation may be relevant to other public policy efforts such as gun control, alcohol, obesity, asbestos, etc.  We have also made repeated close judgment calls to include or not include articles where tobacco control was otherwise related, but not necessarily central, such as articles about class action litigation or punitive damages generally.  Our standard for inclusion was to ask whether the article was mostly, or at least significantly, about tobacco control.

Furthermore, our assignment of keywords necessarily involved choices as to closest fit using a convenience set of issue topics that appear most frequently.  Consequently, the keyword search tool can be a first-step toward finding articles on a particular issue, but it may not provide complete answers.  Users are advised to search among related topics for the broadest results.

As with any other aspect of this website, we welcome comments and suggestions for revisions.  Contact us.