Can Lawyers Beat Big Food? Fat Chance

One of the very first things I ever wrote as a journalist was an article on whether we could sue fast-food companies for making us fat, the way people sued tobacco companies. (The conclusion I reached: You can file a lawsuit over anything, but that doesn't mean you're likely to win. The challenges facing such a lawsuit are probably overwhelming.) Right on schedule, a few months after I wrote the piece, someone filed such a lawsuit, and it was quickly dismissed.

Verily it is written that there is nothing new under the sun. Last week, almost a dozen years after I wrote that article, Politico reported that lawyers are pitching the attorneys general in 16 states with the idea of a massive lawsuit modeled on the one that ultimately brought the tobacco industry to heel: