An attorney for Harvard University said the school intends not to cooperate with a recent Big Tobacco subpoena requesting Harvard relinquish documents related to cigarette studies conducted over the last 50 years.
Harvard was one of eight colleges to receive a subpoena from the major U.S. tobacco companies, currently facing a federal lawsuit alleging they long neglected overwhelming evidence of the dangers of cigarettes. The companies, including Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, asked the schools to disclose all documentation from academic studies conducted on tobacco consumption for possible use in its defense.
The other subpoenaed schools include Johns Hopkins University, New York University, North Carolina State University, University of Arizona and three schools in the University of California system. Of the eight, only North Carolina State complied with the request.
The subpoena was issued to Harvard to request the university release all records from federally funded research projects conducted over the last half-century, plus 54 specific studies dating as far back as 1961.
Harvard attorney Diane Lopez, who said the university receives similar subpoenas regularly, called the companies’ request “absurdly overbroad.” She said a compliance with the subpoena would require an unreasonably large amount of time and effort, seeing as university employees would have to sift through decades worth of reports before they could be sent out.
“This subpoena just was so outrageous in terms of content — it didn’t matter who was asking, we couldn’t comply,” Lopez said. “We would never do this kind of crazy amount of work.”
Lopez argued the subpoena is in violation of the First Amendment rights of research participants, whose confidentiality might be compromised if the documents were released. This claim, she said, is backed by a 1998 case against Microsoft, in which a judge ruled unpublished information obtained by Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers was confidential.
“Any time you’re dealing with the research process, we believe certain documents would be protected from disclosure,” Lopez said.
John Sorrells, a spokesman for Phillip Morris, called the subpoenas “part of the discovery process” as the companies formulate a defense. He would not reveal how the companies plan to use any research acquired from the schools.
“We view these as very narrowly tailored, targeted requests for information we believe is important to the lawsuit,” he said.
Lopez, however, speculated the tobacco companies may have knowledge of the studies’ contents, although she did not believe research conducted at Harvard would be helpful in their defense.
“My guess is that many of these studies produced papers, so it’s possible they know very well what the results of the research are,” she said. “My understanding is such that I don’t think there’s anything that would be beneficial. They’ve been documenting the negative effects of cigarette smoking for years and years and years around here.”
While the U.S. government receives reports on the findings of all federally funded studies, the university holds on to all further documentation. Reports held by the government are open to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, which Harvard contested unsuccessfully following the act’s expansion in 1999.
Deborah Griffith, director of news services at North Carolina State, said her school complied with the subpoena, despite the difficulty in retrieving all applicable documents, because of the state’s broad public records law.
“Most, if not all, of the documents could have been obtained by anyone with or without a subpoena,” she said.
Griffith said the school thoroughly sifted through the documents to ensure there was no sensitive research data or proprietary information that was confidential under state law.
“We don’t think there was any threat to academic freedom or research,” she said. “There’s no reason to say no.”
Although Lopez said the university has not yet made attempts to gauge the difficulty a full review of the studies would entail, she said Harvard would comply with a less burdensome request if approached. Thus far, the university has not been contacted about this type of approach.
“If they were to narrow this in some way to information that is actually important to their litigation and we had other protections built in for our study subjects, we’d have to comply,” Lopez said.
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