One of the interesting things about that new mega-media event, "A Civil Action," has been its reception in the legal community. As those familiar with Jonathan Harr's book or the Disney/Touchstone film know, "A Civil Action" is an example of '90s docu-environmentalism at its most tendentious. It tells the story of a half-dozen dying children from Woburn, Mass., and their parents' lawsuit claiming that heartless Fortune 500 firms caused those deaths by dumping chemicals in the local river.
Predictably, the hero of "A Civil Action" is Jan Schlichtmann, the untried, daredevil attorney who leads the grieving families in their hundred-million-dollar action against W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods. And, just as predictably, the demons here are the defense lawyers, portrayed as a bunch of etiolated establishment cogs. Yet rather than applaud their fellow trial lawyer, the legal community has been highly critical of Mr. Schlichtmann, noting his reckless scorn for standard rules of evidence and courtroom procedure generally. Mr. Schlichtmann's go-go tactics just don't sit well with many of those who passed through traditional law schools. "Even relatively liberal lawyers had trouble with this case," says Walter Olson, a legal scholar.
Future attorneys, though, may not have such reservations. That's because "A Civil Action," the book, is now taught as a text at more than 50 law schools, including, the New York Times reports, Harvard, Yale and Georgetown. The idea is to replace "The Paper Chase" era of legal teaching with the era of "A Civil Action." Instead of plowing through boring, dry old civil procedure, students now spend evenings curled up in armchairs following the exploits of the Porsche-driving, mustachioed Mr. Schlichtmann, a man who walks away from a $20 million settlement offer--too low--and says of his work, "This was war, not litigation."
Most law professors tend to see their choice of textbook as a mere matter of pedagogy. Thus Zygmunt Plater, a professor at Boston College Law School, in the New York Times: "The old war-of-attrition-game-of-wits where the teacher was saying 'I'm smarter than anybody' was shown to be a foolish waste. What you want to do is engage students actively and this book does it." In other words, a shift in method, not substance.
The trouble is that, in the law, the method often is the substance. Mr. Schlichtmann's courtroom theatrics disguised the fact that his case was a weak one--the Woburn children died of leukemia, but neither of the chemicals in the Woburn water, trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene, had been linked to the disease. And his big-spending habits substantially reduced his clients' ultimate rewards. Yet the message of "A Civil Action" is that science is made in the courtroom, and that personality--even a flawed personality like Mr. Schlichtmann's--is to be valued over impartiality or facts.
We don't want to ascribe too much power to one book or film. The legal culture was already pretty bad before Disney/Touchstone got to work, and the trend toward valuing outcomes over facts in the law has been under way for decades. Still, the constant drumbeat from the popular culture on behalf of this view is ominous. Lawyers used to be critical of their colleagues' ambulance chasing; this pejorative term, after all, originated in the legal community. Now, though, we must prepare for a generation of law grads that makes the ambulance chaser its hero.
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