Judge Dismisses Landmark Tobacco Liability Lawsuit : Law: Action is taken after request is made by lawyers for Cipollone family. High court had sent case back for retrial.

A landmark lawsuit against the cigarette industry was dismissed by a judge Thursday at the request of lawyers for the plaintiffs, the family of a woman who claimed that smoking caused her fatal lung cancer.

The case had been sent back to federal court in Newark for retrial in June by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court said a 1965 federal law requiring warning labels on cigarette packages did not shield the companies from all lawsuits based on state personal injury laws.

The 7-2 ruling also said smokers needed to do more than prove that cigarette advertising and promotions tend to minimize the health hazards.

U.S. District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise dismissed the case with the consent of the family of Rose Cipollone, said Alan Darnell, an attorney for the family. Darnell would not elaborate. Marc Z. Edell, another attorney for the family, declined to comment.

A court clerk said the case was dismissed with prejudice, which means the lawsuit cannot be filed again. The judge’s order did not elaborate.

Edell had said earlier that the Supreme Court ruling would likely generate more lawsuits against cigarette companies. But Charles Wall, associate general counsel for Philip Morris Cos. Inc. in New York, said Thursday that the high court’s ruling made suing cigarette companies more “time consuming and expensive.”

“The litigation is complex, lengthy and difficult,” Wall said. “Those are significant reasons” why the lawsuit might have been dropped.

The case began in 1983 when Cipollone, of Little Ferry, sued the cigarette companies that made the brands she smoked for 42 years. Cipollone died in 1984 at age 58.

A federal jury in 1988 ordered Liggett Group Inc. to pay her husband, Antonio, $400,000--the nation’s first monetary damage award against the industry. The jury absolved Philip Morris Inc. and Lorillard Inc., which made other brands of cigarettes that Cipollone smoked.

The U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the award in 1990 and ordered a new trial. The appeals court also ruled that the 1965 warning label law shielded the industry from claims about the adequacy of health warnings.

Antonio Cipollone died in 1990, and the Cipollones’ son, Thomas, continued the appeal.

Richard Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston and chairman of the Tobacco Products Liability Project, which encourages lawsuits against tobacco companies as a health issue, said that dropping the Cipollone lawsuit would not deter similar claims against the tobacco industry.

The Supreme Court’s Cipollone decision “is still the law of the land,” Daynard said.