A Civil Action

Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action is a 1995 nonfiction account of the legal case Anderson v. Cryovac, which disputed whether water contamination was the cause of leukemia in the defendant’s child and other members of the community. The case was between several families in Woburn, Massachusetts, and two corporations, Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace. Harr is an American writer and journalist. A Civil Action was his first book, followed by Funeral Wars (2001) and The Lost Painting (2005).

Problems with the American Justice System, The Value of Life, and The Danger of Obsession emerge as major themes in A Civil Action. The book examines the American justice system and asks hard questions about the possibility of holding large corporations accountable through legal means. Along with other awards, the book received the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was adapted into a film in 1998.

Plot Summary

The book is divided into named, unnumbered chapters, which each contain numbered subsections. It is told in a novelistic style through the perspective of an omniscient narrator, who stands in for the author and follows different characters’ perspectives at different points in the narrative.

When the book begins, a young boy named Jimmy Anderson gets sick. His mother, Anne Anderson, believes it is just a cold. Jimmy’s condition rapidly deteriorates, however, and soon he is diagnosed with leukemia. Approximately the first quarter of the book presents the backstory of the Andersons and several other Woburn families whose children are stricken with leukemia. The cases all occur within a relatively small neighborhood, an uncanny coincidence that leads Anne to seek legal representation.

She and the other families with sick children enlist the services of a lawyer named Jan Schlichtmann, who puts together the lawsuit that will try two corporations for poisoning the groundwater that they allege spread hazardous chemicals into the water supply. Schlichtmann is a young but ambitious lawyer. He believes in a grand destiny for himself, which is what leads him to take the case, which he at first declines for lack of evidence. It is a case that few other lawyers would consider, given the enormity of its size and the difficulty in proving the link between the chemicals in the water and the cluster of leukemia cases.

Although it is a courtroom drama, most of the book takes place in the documentation of the Woburn case, which is shown in minute detail over the book’s nearly 500 pages. The play-by-play account highlights the overwhelming odds that stand against the defendants and the labyrinthine, back-and-forth complexity of the legal process. There are endless motions filed by both sides, innumerable meetings with the judge, constant bickering between the lawyers and their partners, and bottomless financial woes for Schlichtmann’s firm, which does not bring in enough money to finance the case. The presiding judge, Federal District Judge Walter J. Skinner, proves to be in league with the representative for Beatrice Foods and foils Schlichtmann’s efforts to get a fair trial for the defendants.

Ultimately, the jury exonerates Beatrice Foods and indicts W.R. Grace. Rather than being prosecuted, Grace settles with Schlichtmann for $8 million—much less than Schlichtmann expected—before the second phase of the trial can begin.