The 45-page ruling by the three-judge panel sends the 2001 lawsuit against PM USA back to Hennepin County District Court.
The class would include people who bought Marlboro Lights in Minnesota for their personal use from 1972 through November 2004. [image-nocss] The number of people in the class and the amount of damages they would seek was not immediately available. The plaintiffs are seeking refunds of money they spent on the cigarettes.
In a statement cited by AP, Richmond, Va.-based PM USA said it was considering its options for an appeal. The company said it believes class-action status is inappropriate because the circumstances of each smoker are different.
The district court denied the request for class certification in 2004, saying it was necessary to look at each person's reasons for smoking light cigarettes and the manner in which they smoked them. But later that year, the district court reversed itself and certified the class, saying that because the injury being claimed was economic, not physical, all class members suffered similar injury.
The appeals court judges agreed with the class certification.
"As we understand it, appellants' theory of damages is that, no matter what individual factors may have been involved in a class member's decision to purchase Lights, all consumers of Lights were led by false advertising to believe that Lights were healthier than regular cigarettes when they were not," the judges wrote.
Courts around the country have been split on whether similar cases can proceed as class-action claims.
The Tobacco Products Liability Project, which is based at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston and advocates for litigation against the tobacco industry as a way of improving public health, said class certification has been granted in state courts in Missouri, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
But in New York in 2008, an appeals court ruled against class certification. And last month, a federal court in Maine concluded that class certification was inappropriate in cases pending in Illinois, California, Washington, D.C., and Maine.
Tuesday's opinion dealt with several other issues in the case, as well, said AP. Among them, the appeals court judges said Minnesota's $6.1 billion settlement with the tobacco industry in 1998 does not bar this lawsuit from going forward.
In 2009, Congress passed a law banning the marketing of tobacco products with words such as "light" or "low-tar." This year, Philip Morris changed the name of Marlboro Lights to Marlboro Gold Pack.
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