[Independent Institute] The state of Mississippi’s lawsuit against tobacco companies in 1994 was quickly emulated by more than a dozen other states and then the federal government. Not to be outdone, more than a dozen cities and the federal government have followed the City of New Orleans’s lead and sued gun manufacturers. Do these lawsuits signal new directions for more effective public policy or a new and dangerous trend whereby governments use tort law to achieve public policy objectives they were unable to accomplish legislatively? In this new policy report, so-called government “recoupment” lawsuits are carefully examined and found to be flagrant abuses of the constitutional separation of powers, seriously undermining over two hundred years of common-law torts adjudication. Author Michael Krauss, a leading legal scholar on the relationship between tort law and personal freedoms, systematically dissects the tobacco and firearm recoupment lawsuits. He shows how such lawsu