Tobacco Industry Influence on the American Law Institute’s Restatements of Torts and Implications for Its Conflict of Interest Policies, 98 Iowa Law Review 1 (2012)by Elizabeth Laposata,  Richard Barnes  & Stanton Glantz

Mining the millions of documents in the Legacy Tobacco Library they learned that tobacco industry lawyers working with their industry clients succeeded in modifying the draft Restatement to protect the tobacco industry from lawsuits.  A prime actor was Covington & Burling partner and tobacco industry defense architect H. Thomas Austern who arranged a December 1961 meeting between tort law giant William L. Prosser and  the Committee on Legal Affairs of the now notorious Tobacco Institute.  The “good tobacco” language soon entered the draft, helping to insulate the industry from tort liability….

I report in more detail HERE on the thin protection from client-centered lobbying in a law reform organization that is afforded by RPC 6.4, compared to the rigorous disclosure standards and commitment of federal advisory bodies like the National Academy of Sciences.