I'm reading the book "Blink" (Malcolm ?) and he has a section where he says that medical lawsuits are not based on medical issues, but can be predicted based solely on how the medical professional treats his patient when talking to them.
The book is fascinating, but I'll diverge from it a bit to simply say that a way of looking at this is that the lawyers know to go after doctors who will be unsympathetic to juries, because they can get big money (that is NOT a point made in the book, which in this case is about why the patients would want to sue).
"I suspect most Americans think that the $368 billion penalty extracted from the tobacco industry was inherently unfair."
Unfortunately, the author might be wrong. Indiana has been considering an NYC-style smoking ban for some time now, so I've asked my co-workers what they think about it.
The vast majority of people I talk to say something along the lines of: "I have the right to go out to a restaurant and not smell smoke. We need to ban smoking."
Scary!