Mr. John P. Coale was one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers that initiated the first tobacco settlement agreements, which included a historic and ingenious scheme for individual states to levy the economic equivalent of national (sic) excise taxes. The scheme has been a topic in my excise-tax lectures for as long as I have been teaching them. Let’s not forget that Mr. Coale entered the fray when tobacco companies were thought to be invincible in the litigation arena.
