The Tortoise and the Hare Entry No. 15

A Civil Action by J. Harr

As a freshman lawyer, I was tasked to research on some questions in an environmental case. A retired justice sat to preside over our brainstorming sessions, with the entire slate of newly minted lawyers recruited to help him. He was so old that he dozed off every time we began to recite our answers. He then would wake as we were about to conclude and deduce an opposite idea from what we’ve just posited. But we’d keep our silence, out of respect, and let the senior associate steer him to what we just said.

It would be the last time I would work on an environmental case of that magnitude. The case in this book reminds me of that. Two large corporations were accused of dumping chemical waste in their land, thereby contaminating the Aberjona aquifer and two wells that supplied water to the community in Woburn, MA. Leukemia clusters were found in the small community. Did the corporations, in fact, pollute the water, and did it proximately cause the leukemias?

Harr covered this story for eight years. Depositions before trial reached the height of a three-story building. Plaintiffs’ counsels were perceived as ambulance chasers, but some ambulance chasers they were for fronting $2.7M in expenses, with no idea how the case would turn out. Huge geological studies were drawn. Harvard lawyers milled about during trial. The story riveted the community as it sought big companies in the 80s to confront their waste seriously. It was a political case constrained as a civil action.

Through this book, I understood the difference between a thriller involving the law and a legal thriller. The latter is not edge-of-the-seat, theatrical, with an extralegal event saving the day. It is comprehensive, painstaking to a fault, with the battle being fought in the legal arena.

Recommended for those who want to be lawyers. It shows the sobering reality of a life in the law. The case runs the gamut of evidence gathering, discovery, trial, and negotiation. There is no climax, as in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is a reportage of moving increments. By the time the crumbs amount to something, how much of a lawyer’s life is spent?