Can Pisco Argue That Coorss Advertising Was Unreasonable?
Is there any legal basis, then, for Pisco’s suit? Possibly — but it would have to come from Coors’s advertising, not its beer. Pisco may try to predicate her suit on Coors’s advertising — on one of two theories. The first is that a message in the advertising created an unreasonable risk to Pisco, and that this unreasonable risk was foreseeable to Coors. The argument, I suppose, is that the message Coors’s advertising might have been reasonably safe for adults, but not for minors such as Ryan. What facts might support this argument? If evidence were to show that Coors knew that its advertising–especially print ads in magazines with under-21 readers –would get minors interested in drinking Coors beer, that might be helpful to Pisco’s case. (The U.S. government is making a similar argument, based on similar evidence, in its current racketeering suit against the tobacco industry.) But making this argument will be an uphill battle. Coors, like all businesses, has a First Amendment right
