I am very involved in trying to help advocacy organizations and health ministries in the Asian Pacific region adopt strong tobacco control laws. Almost all of these countries have ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which in theory requires them to ban all tobacco advertising, protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke, put large warning labels on both sides of cigarette packs and more. But the treaty is not self-executing, the tobacco industry's influence in many countries is strong, and there's a lot of confusion about how to proceed. Along with colleagues at the Public Health Advocacy Institute, I've been working on model legislation for the Western Pacific Regional Office of the World Health Organization and meeting with public health activists and government officials in India, Nepal, the Philippines and Indonesia (with China and Vietnam coming up).

Perhaps one that never got brought. For several years the Law and Obesity Project of the Public Health Advocacy Institute was considering, pretty loudly, the possibility of suing the soda companies to get their machines out of schools. The idea we developed was that the machines are similar to attractive nuisances. Coke and Pepsi have been proven to contribute to obesity in teenagers -- soda has serious adverse health effects -- and since the kids are required to be in school five days a week, they have to pass the machines going to and from classes. Under Mass. Gen. L. Ch. 93A, it's illegal to commit unfair or deceptive practices in commerce, and our argument was that the policy of Massachusetts law was pretty clear that owners of things that lure kids into danger are liable for the damage they cause. Well, we never got to test the theory in court because we negotiated with the soda companies and were close to an agreement when the soda companies decided to take a better deal from the Clinton Foundation. The net result is a voluntary agreement that they'll at least get the high calorie sodas out of school machines within the next three years. It wasn't the perfect result, but it's a lot better than the situation before we started talking about suing them.

This year I have, along with colleagues at the Public Health Advocacy Institute, published a chapter on Tobacco Use-related Diseases in the 2nd edition of Law and Public Health Practice, Oxford University Press; a much downloaded article on "Punishing Tobacco Industry Misconduct: The Case for Exceeding a Single Digit Ratio Between Punitive and Compensatory Damages", 67 University of Pittsburgh Law Review, 1; and "Applying Lessons from Tobacco Litigation to Obesity Lawsuits," 20 American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 82.

I really like Edith Wharton's House of Mirth and Philip Roth's I Married a Communist.

Walking (anywhere) and traveling. My wife, Carol, and I used to have to think about where we wanted to go: now, we just see where my tobacco (and sometimes obesity) work takes us, and plan interesting sidetrips from there.

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