A spate of legislations prohibiting cigarette smoking in enclosed public spaces, mainly on grounds of public health protection, recently swept across cities around the world. This is in tandem with a raft of increasingly restrictive national laws that emerged on the back of the ratification of the WHO Framework for Tobacco Control by more than one 168 countries in 2005. The central debate on the increasingly restrictive tobacco laws revolves on the extent to which public health interests justification should ground (...) political intervention in a private right as basic as tobacco smoking, which interestingly is often lumped in the food and beverage category. The pertinent legal and ethical questions therefore are the following: Is or should there be a general unrestricted right to tobacco smoking? If there were such a right, should public health or ethical considerations trump private right to smoke in enclosed public spaces? And if public health interests were so paramount, should they go farther and ground tobacco smoking proscription in all private and public spheres? Using ethical principles and rights-based arguments, the paper critically examines the legal and ethical ramifications of public health justification for tobacco smoking proscription in enclosed public spaces. (shrink)

It is axiomatic that tobacco smoking is hazardous to health. The statistics are well documented and often very grim. For example, the 2008 World Health Organization Report on the global tobacco epidemic presented the following statistics: a hundred million people died of tobacco-related diseases globally in the 20th century; there are approximately over five million tobacco-related deaths every year; and an estimated one billion could die of tobacco-related diseases in this 21st century.Significantly, no other risky, self-indulgent addictive behaviors such as (...) cocaine abuse directly endanger bystanders as much as cigarette smoking or tobacco use endangers nonsmokers through secondhand tobacco smoke or inhaled environmental tobacco smoke. Environmental tobacco smoke comprises sidestream smoke and mainstream smoke. About 85 percent of environmental tobacco smoke is sidestream smoke, while the remainder is mainstream smoke. (shrink)

This paper critically reviews the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit In re: Jayson Reynoso: Frankfort Digital Services et al., v. Sara L. Kistler, United States Trustee et al. (2007) 447 F.3d 1117. The appellants, who were non-lawyers, were indicted with unauthorised practice of law for offering bankruptcy petition services via online legal software or expert systems in law configured for filing bankruptcy petition forms. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (...) found inter alia that appellants were bankruptcy petition preparers, and not being lawyers, had exceeded their clerical remit by offering legal advice and legal services in contravention of California law regulating legal practice and 11 U.S.C. Sect. 110 of the Bankruptcy Code (2002). While examining the legal ramifications of the use of legal software by non-lawyers in the preparation of legal documents, the paper critically reviews the factual circumstances of the Reynoso decision in the context of juridical and statutory constructs of unauthorised practice of law in the United States. The paper poses the question whether Reynoso should be viewed as a one-off decision bound by its peculiar facts, or good law for the broad proposition that non-lawyers cannot use legal software in legal documents preparation. The paper also notes the possible legal barriers to an unconditional ban on the design, sale, distribution, and uses of legal software by non-lawyers. These range from the First Amendment right to free speech, constitutional right to pro se legal representation, interstate commerce doctrine, to antitrust provisions of the Sherman Act. A regime of best practices for the use of legal software or expert systems in law by non-lawyers is proffered. (shrink)