In Memory of

A Tribute to Susan Rosenblatt

The extended version of this tribute
can be viewed here

Susan Rosenblatt Obituary ImageSusan Rosenblatt, Who Took On Big Tobacco, Dies at 70
She was the quieter half of a law partnership with her husband that pursued a suit against cigarette companies on behalf of Florida smokers

New York Times ObituaryDownload Here

This was an article in the New York Times, not a paid obituary.

December 3, 2021

Susan Rosenblatt, who with her husband and law partner, Stanley Rosenblatt, took on Big Tobacco in a Florida case that seemed an absurd mismatch for their small firm, but that resulted in a record $144.8 billion jury award in favor of people sickened by cigarettes, died on November 14 in Houston. She was 70. Her death at MD Anderson Cancer Center was confirmed by her son David Rosenblatt, who said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.

Ms. Rosenblatt, who lived in Miami Beach, was the quieter side of the Rosenblatt firm; in the headline-making tobacco case and other prominent lawsuits, Stanley Rosenblatt did much of the in-court presenting and after-court news conferencing. But it was Ms. Rosenblatt’s legal scholarship — the research she did, the briefs she wrote — that provided the ammunition that made their successes possible.

“I always would say I didn’t have a dream team, I had Susan,” Mr. Rosenblatt said in a phone interview.

That dream team (which also included a small support staff) was never more challenged than by the case the Rosenblatts filed in 1994 against R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco companies on behalf of seven smokers — one of whom, Dr. Howard A. Engle was the pediatrician for most of the Rosenblatts’ nine children and became the lead plaintiff. The case was certified as a class action representing all Florida smokers, a group that encompassed hundreds of thousands of people.

The case, one of a number being pursued at the time against the industry by states and individuals, dragged on for years. In 1996, when the biggest of those cases, a national class-action suit, was thrown out by a federal appellate panel in New Orleans, Mr. Rosenblatt told The New York Times, “Now it’s up to Ma and Pa Kettle.”

He and his wife pressed on with the Engle case, arguing that the industry had knowingly addicted smokers and failed to warn them adequately about the dangers of their products.

In 2000, a jury awarded several representative plaintiffs $12.7 million in compensatory damages, then followed that up with a stunning award of punitive damages to the whole class: almost $145 billion, the largest such award in history.

Susan Rosenblatt - Engle Trial

Ms. Rosenblatt in 2004 with Frank Amodeo, one of the plaintiffs in the class-action suit the Rosenblatts filed in 1994 against R.J. Reynolds and other cigarette companies

Ms. Rosenblatt with her husband in a Miami courtroom in 1999 during jury selection in their class-action tobacco suit. Al Diaz/Miami Herald

Ms. Rosenblatt with her husband in a Miami courtroom in 1999 during jury selection in their class-action tobacco suit. Al Diaz/Miami Herald

The award didn’t stand; in 2003 a Florida appeals panel threw it out, finding, among other things, that the case should not have been declared a class action because each smoker’s case is unique. But the Rosenblatts’ efforts weren’t wasted: In 2006 the Florida Supreme Court ruled that individuals who wanted to pursue cases could invoke some of the original jury’s findings, including that smoking causes lung cancer, that nicotine in cigarettes is addictive and that the cigarette companies concealed information about smoking’s health effects.

Individual suits, known as the Engle progeny cases, have been working through the Florida courts ever since some successfully and some not.

Mr. Rosenblatt said the legacy of his and his wife’s work was the precedent.

“The fraud, the conspiracy — there’s a record now of just how evil the tobacco industry had been all those years,” he said.

Susan Goldman was born on Jan. 5, 1951, in Brooklyn. Her parents, Sol and Shirley (Kaslow) Goldman, operated a real estate business together. When Susan was about 10, the family moved to Miami Beach. Academically, she was a prodigy, enrolling at the University of Miami at 13 and graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. She graduated from the university’s law school in 1972. She received a master of laws degree in 1978.

She and Mr. Rosenblatt married in 1980. She maintained her own appellate practice until her growing family took precedence.
“But after three children, I really was bored,” she told The Miami Herald in 1996. “I’m not the type to go out with girlfriends to lunch.”

So she began working with her husband, even as their family continued to grow. “I was very fortunate to have easy pregnancies,” she told The Herald. “And the kind of work I do is reading cases, reading depositions, preparing briefs, which I could do at home in bed.”

Although the Ma and Pa Kettle self-description was apt in some ways, the Rosenblatts were hardly neophytes when they took on the tobacco companies. They had won significant awards for plaintiffs in a number of cases. Most notably, they had already taken on the tobacco industry in another case, representing airline flight attendants who argued that their health had been damaged by secondhand smoke in the days when smoking was allowed on airplanes. That case, filed in 1991, ended in 1997 with a settlement in which the cigarette companies agreed to pay $300 million for the study of tobacco-related diseases.

Ms. Rosenblatt said that she had been reluctant to take on Big Tobacco —
“I thought it was chasing windmills,” she told The Times in 2000. But, her husband said, she came around and nudged him ahead, knowing he’d get a kick out of deposing the tobacco executives he had come to revile.

“I think she was humoring me,” he said. “‘Take the depositions of these guys and have some fun, and it’s not going to go anywhere.’ And it took over our life.”

When the Engle case went ahead, the tobacco industry, as it had in other cases, tried to bury its opponents in motions and challenges, hoping to exhaust the lawyers and the plaintiffs. During the trial itself, which stretched for almost two years, the companies would sometimes bring in skilled lawyers just to examine a single witness or argue a single motion, Mr. Rosenblatt said, while he relied on his wife.

“Sometimes, the only thing I’d use to cross-examine those witnesses was what Susan would have prepared for me,” he said. And while he was cross-examining, she would be working on what he needed the next day.

If Mr. Rosenblatt drew most of the attention, Ms. Rosenblatt was, as The Chicago Sun-Times described her in 2000, “the expert on the law balancing his expertise in front of the jury, the worrier compared with his slouching nonchalance, the detail person balancing his big-picture view.”

In addition to her husband and their son David, Ms. Rosenblatt is survived by two other sons, Joshua and Moshe; six daughters, Miriam Hoffman, Rachel Gdanski, Rebecca Assaraf, Jaclyn Richter, Rina Kleiner, and Sharon Franco; a brother, Alan Goldman; a sister, Ruth Schwager; and 30 grandchildren.

Busy as they were, the Rosenblatts, who were Orthodox Jews, never worked on the Sabbath, yet Ms. Rosenblatt sometimes lamented that she spent so much time on cases at the expense of home life. Mr. Rosenblatt, though, said there was a philosophy behind their domestic madness.

“Susan felt, and I agreed with her, that the most important thing parents can do is set an example,” he said.

Ms. Hoffman, the couple’s eldest daughter, said one bit of family lore merged Ms. Rosenblatt’s legal expertise and parenting skills. At one point, she said, her mother acquired a used mini-school bus — yellow, of course — to transport the brood here and there. A Miami Beach neighbor complained that parking a yellow school bus in a residential neighborhood was a violation of city code. Ms. Rosenblatt, Ms. Hoffman said, convinced an administrative judge that if the bus weren’t yellow, it would be in compliance. So she had the thing painted green.

“That was my mom,” Ms. Hoffman said by email. “She always had a special way of doing things. Unlike anyone else.”

SUSAN ROSENBLATT (1951-2021)

CLASS COUNSEL OF BROIN LITIGATION, 1991-1999
CO-FOUNDER OF FAMRI AND TRUSTEE, 2000-2021

 

JULIUS B. RICHMOND, M.D. (1916-2008)

PAST SURGEON GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES, PROFESSOR EMERITUS HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL
CHAIRMAN OF FAMRI’s MEDICAL ADVISORY BOARD, 1997-2008
Learn more about Dr. Richmond’s Legacy here>>

 

WILLIAM G. CAHAN, M.D. (1910-2002)

THORACIC SURGEON, MEMORIAL SLOAN-KETTERING CANCER CENTER
PIONEER IN FIGHTING AND CURING DISEASES CAUSED BY TOBACCO SMOKE
MEMBER OF FAMRI’s MEDICAL ADVISORY BOARD, 1997-2002

 

BLAND LANE (1929-2007)

46-YEAR FLIGHT ATTENDANT CAREER FOR PAN AMERICAN
AND UNITED AIRLINES
FAMRI FLIGHT ATTENDANT TRUSTEE, 1997-2007

 

KATHLEEN S. CHENEY (1946-2014)

20-YEAR FLIGHT ATTENDANT CAREER FOR EASTERN AIRLINES WHERE SHE DEVELOPED SMOKERS’ DISEASES FROM EXPOSURE TO SECONDHAND TOBACCO SMOKE
ADVOCATED FOR A SMOKE-FREE GEORGIA
FAMRI FLIGHT ATTENDANT TRUSTEE, 2012-2014

 

THE REVEREND MICHAEL CROSBY (1940-2017)

CAPUCHIN FRIAR
COORDINATOR TOBACCO PROGRAM, INTERFAITH CENTER OF CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY
MEMBER OF FAMRI’S LAY BOARD AND CHAIRMAN, 2000-2016

 

RITA L. ZEMLOCK (1927-2021)

FOUNDER OF GASP OF MIAMI, INC.
MEMBER OF FAMRI’S LAY ADVISORY BOARD, 2000-2015

 

BILLY WILLIAMS (1910-2023)

PRESIDENT OF GASP OF TEXAS, INC.
MEMBER OF FAMRI’S LAY ADVISORY BOARD, 2000-2017

 

RONALD M. DAVIS, M.D. (1956-2008)

PAST PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
FAMRI WILLIAM CAHAN DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR AND FAMRI-FUNDED CLINICAL INVESTIGATOR AT HENRY FORD HEALTH SYSTEM
RESEARCH AND EDUCATION ON SMOKE-FREE AIR FOR PETS AND FAMILIES
FOUR PEER-REVIEW ARTICLES RESULTED
2002-2007; 2005-2008

 

THOMAS L. PETTY, M.D. (1932-2009)

FOUNDER OF NATIONAL LUNG HEALTH EDUCATION PROGRAM FOR
EARLY DETECTION OF COPD
FAMRI WILLIAM CAHAN DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR
ONE PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE RESULTED
2003-2009

 

BARRY TRINK, Ph.D. (1950-2019)

FAMRI-FUNDED CLINICAL INVESTIGATOR AT JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS TO STUDY GPI TRANSAMIDASE COMPLEX SUBUNITS AS ONCOGENES IN BLADDER CANCER TO DETERMINE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TOBACCO SMOKE EXPOSURE AND ONCOGENIC POTENTIAL
FIVE PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES RESULTED
2003-2006; 2007-2010

 

PIERRE P. MASSION, M.D. (1963-2021)

FAMRI-FUNDED CLINICAL INVESTIGATOR AT VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY TO STUDY IDENTIFICATION OF NEW MOLECULAR TARGETS IN LUNG CANCER WHICH IDENTIFIED MOLECULAR ABNORMALITIES IN INVASIVE AND PREINVASIVE LUNG CANCERS
SIX PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES RESULTED
2003-2006

 

SCOTT WADLER, M.D. (1946-2007)

FAMRI-FUNDED CLINICAL INVESTIGATOR AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY TO STUDY PATTERNS OF GENE EXPRESSION IN EARLY LUNG LESIONS
2004-2007

 

OFFIE P. SOLDIN, Ph.D., MBA (1952- 2014)

FAMRI-FUNDED CLINICAL INVESTIGATOR AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY TO STUDY TOBACCO SMOKE EXPOSURE ASSOCIATIONS WITH HORMONAL CHANGES AND THE RISK OF SPONTANEOUS ABORTION AND TOBACCO SMOKE EXPOSURE AND GENETIC DISPOSITION ASSOCIATIONS WITH HORMONAL CHANGES IN WOMEN
FIFTY-TWO PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS RESULTED
2006-2009; 2009-2012

FAMRI FUNDS SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR THE EARLY DETECTION, TREATMENT, AND CURE OF DISEASES ASSOCIATED WITH TOBACCO SMOKE. FAMRI HAS PROVIDED HISTORICAL AND CURRENT PUBLISHED INFORMATION ON SMOKING AND HEALTH FROM A VARIETY OF PUBLICATIONS AS A RESOURCE FOR THOSE VISITING ITS WEBSITE. FAMRI DOES NOT VOUCH FOR THE ACCURACY OF THIS INFORMATION.
Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute (FAMRI) 2024