Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This paper describes secondhand smoke (SHS) litigation over the past quarter century where non-smoking litigants have prevailed and attempts to decipher trends in the law that may impact the course of future cases. METHODS: Since the early 1980s, the author has sought and examined legal cases in which SHS exposure is an important factor. Law library searches using the official reporter system (for example, Shimp v. New Jersey Bell Telephone Co., 368 A.2d 408) have more recently been combined with computerised online searches using LexisNexis and Westlaw. The author has learned of other cases through personal correspondence and from articles in newspapers. Over 420 cases involving exposure to SHS were identified. Each case was reviewed and summarised. RESULTS: Since 1976, the year of the first reported SHS lawsuit, this type of litigation has increased both in number and in scope with increasing success. While it is common for initial cases to lose in a new area where the law eventually evolves, litigants and their lawyers who later bring similar cases can learn from those previous, unsuccessful cases. It is now apparent that the judicial branch has begun to recognise the need to protect the public-especially some of the most vulnerable members of our society-from the serious threat to their health that is exposure to SHS. CONCLUSIONS: Successful cases brought on behalf of individuals exposed to SHS produce an additional benefit for the public health by both paving the way for other non-smoking litigants to succeed in their cases and persuading business owners and others voluntarily to make their facilities 100% smoke-free.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".