“The government can require warnings which are straightforward and essentially uncontroversial, but they can’t require a cigarette pack to serve as a mini-billboard for the government’s antismoking campaign”

—FLOYD ABRAMS, a lawyer for Lorillard, one of five tobacco companies that filed a lawsuit against the FDA in Washington on Tuesday, over the agency's graphic cigarette warning labels. The companies say the emotionally charged warnings, which include images of a stitched-up corpse and diseased lungs, violate their free speech rights. The companies lost a similar suit last year in Kentucky. [via The New York Times]