In 1994, the attorneys general of four states—Mississippi, Minnesota, Florida, and Texas—separately filed lawsuits against the tobacco industry in an effort to secure reimbursement for health care expenditures arising from tobacco-related illnesses. During the course of this litigation, 42 other states joined in similar legal actions. The library of the University of California San Francisco had started digitizing and hosting internal tobacco industry documents in 1995 as part of wider efforts to make public what the tobacco industry had done and helped drive the turning of public sentiment and litigation against the tobacco companies. In 1998, a Master Settlement Agreement was signed by the attorneys general of 46 states and the nation's five major tobacco companies: Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson, and the American Tobacco Company. The MSA effectively settled the outstanding lawsuits by requiring yearly payments by the tobacco companies to the states and placing restrictions on the advertising and marketing of tobacco products. As part of the Master Settlement Agreement, the U.S. tobacco companies were ordered to release the internal documents produced for the case for public access in both a physical depository in Minnesota and on their own document websites. The international tobacco company, British American Tobacco, was not ordered to provide a document website but they were required to deposit documents into a depository in Guildford, England. The National Association of Attorneys General provides oversight and enforcement of this operation. In 2006, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in a separate case that the nation's top tobacco companies violated racketeering laws, misleading the public for years about the health hazards of smoking. These companies were convicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds filed an appeal but Judge Kessler's ruling was upheld. As a result of this case and its appeals, the companies are now obliged to make available any documents produced for litigation on smoking and health until 2021. The MSA provisions also created and funded the American Legacy Foundation, subsequently renamed the Truth Initiative, an anti-smoking advocacy group, and in the early 2000s the foundation gave approximately $10 million of the settlement funds it managed to UCSF to formalize the collection it already hosted into the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and to expand their efforts. In 2002, NAAG gave the UCSF Library a large number of document index records and images to further develop the Library. Documents are continually added to the MSA collections through the use of spidering applications that identify and download index records and document images directly from the tobacco companies' websites.
Collections
The Library collects and maintains the internal documents of the tobacco companies and their trade organizations that were a party to the Master Settlement Agreement as well as documents from other litigation or companies not party to the settlement. Among the documents are more than 8,000 tobacco industry video and audio tapes including recordings of focus groups, internal corporate meetings, depositions of tobacco industry employees, government hearings, corporate communications, and commercials. Many of the acquired tapes are available for viewing or listening on the Internet Archive at the .
