Analysis of The Main Problem in 'A Civil Action' Film

The case of Anderson and the companies represented in the movie “A Civil Action”, set the pattern in the toxic cleanup. The Environmental Protection Agency continues remarkable measures to assure that a failure like the one that happened in Woburn, Massachusetts never happens again. Over ten years, the children of Woburn, Massachusetts were dying of leukemia. The parents of these unfortunate children brought up a case against the people they believed were responsible for the help of a personal injury lawyer. The evidence against the companies, W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods, responsible were substantial, but Jan Schlichtmann couldn’t defeat the expert defense lawyers hired by the corporations. Although W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods were found innocent, they should have been charged with negligence leading to wrongful deaths. Many investigations concluded that the water in Woburn was not safe. State investigators proved the same as well. The preponderance of the evidence opposed the huge corporations.

A motion of the movie was the shocking story of twelve children who died because of leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts. First of all, Jan Schlichtmann was a successful personal injury lawyer. He helped the families of deceased children to sue a giant food conglomerate, who was liable for harming their children and troubling them fatally with cancer. Since many people were wanting to know the answer to the pollution and the death of their children, Jan represented all of those families as one as the plaintiffs and the defendants were the attorneys coming together so that there would not be a different trial on the same topic being tried. Thus, Jan and his firm now become agents of those families. To mention, the plaintiffs were Anne Anderson and other families. The families ultimately coveted the place cleaned up and an apology from someone reliable. On the other hand, the defendants were Riley Tannery (Beatrice Foods) and W.R. Grace. The fact is they had run construction near the polluted pits. Still, Schichtlmann suffered a difficult burden of discovering that the defendants truly and proximately caused their injuries. A lawsuit is pursued by the plaintiffs because the families wanted an apology, a confession of guilt. In general, the plaintiff wanted from the lawsuit was the evidence hinting trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination of the town's water supply by Riley Tannery and W.R. Grace.

The plaintiffs in the Woburn case brought suit against defendants who caused the plaintiff to poisonous chemicals. In this case, toxic tort plaintiffs have successfully applied the public nuisance action. For example, judge Walter Jay Skinner granted public nuisance attaining to the Woburn plaintiffs because their several diseases were, by their characteristics, personal, and unique injuries. Toxic tort victims have often asserted a negligence cause of action when attempting compensation. A toxic tort plaintiff often disputes that the defendant’s release of dangerous materials amounted to negligent conduct. However, negligence is difficult to show because injuries often reveal themselves years after charging records are hidden or destroyed by the defendant in the Woburn case. For example, Schlichtmann discovered a hidden record that demonstrated that Beatrice knew that its operations were injuring the property’s groundwater after the jury absolved Beatrice from negligence. Jan Schlichtmann, consequently, utilized the Elements of Negligence to strive to prove his lawsuit versus Grace Industries (Grace) and Beatrice Foods (Beatrice). While he was defeated in his effort to reach a guilty judgment from a jury, the suit serves as an illustration of how challenging it is to show negligence in a civil case. Plus, the first element of negligence is the duty of care. Schlichtmann is successful in showing that the plaintiffs had a right to clean drinking water and Beatrice and Grace had a duty to not trespass upon these rights. In other words, Beatrice and Grace had a duty of care to not discharge toxic chemicals in the water, which could pollute drinking water and destroy wildlife. Violation of duty is the next element of negligence and is proven in this case. One example is the man saw his coworkers draining toxic waste into ditches which filled the dirt and started to contaminated drinking water. Hence, Schlichtmann demonstrates this by pointing out that other companies would have had this waste disposed of by experts.

Rule 11 had been designed to control superficial and negligent actions, but it was so weakly experience and access to circumvent that few attorneys ever spent their time summoning it. The source of Cheeseman's Rule 11 motion is Cheeseman discovered that the rule was being updated to make it stronger. His central debate was that the attorneys for the Woburn families had no spots for accusations and would carry it by pointing that nothing was helping the relationship of the chemical included such as TCE or perc to leukemia. Rule 11 was seeking to make Schlichtmann witness against his clients and he declined to do so. However, Schlichtmann intended to anger judge Skinner by continuously talking once he commenced the courtroom and would not remain until he had become the judge’s attention to the barratry care and away from Rule 11. Judge Skinner's final verdict on the Rule 11 motion is the motion was rejected. Later, the tort happens when Barbas would clean off the oily film using TCE, which he purchased from a 55-gallon drum. During construction, a pit was discovered for the administration of construction trash and waste. This pit matured the 'swimming pool'. Al Love was told to clear the containers (of TCE blended with perforating oils and paint mud) into the pit. The amount is unknown. Since a financial burden that happened on Schlichtmann’s firm, the Woburn plaintiffs spent about $4.8 million to try the first half of the trial. The cost of the trial consumed all of the firm’s support and may have pressed the plaintiffs to resolve for a much lower gross than they tried.

The continuing case displays more effective because the plaintiffs' case against Grace was notably stronger for two reasons. First, Schlichtmann had a particular proof of a previous employee of Grace who had observed dumping, and a river among Beatrice's tannery and the contaminated wells presented their supplying to the pollution. Yet, the case against Beatrice was rejected by judge Skinner. In the Woburn lawsuit, the plaintiffs investigated documentation about the defendants’ awareness of groundwater infection, the result of TCE they had drained, and the term they dropped TCE on the ground. The plaintiffs took a small part of this report because the defendants supposedly disposed of their old documents. Schlichtmann found a mysterious sixty-page hydrogeologic document that the defendant had committed a few years before trial after the settlement was finalized. This important report, hidden from the plaintiff, illustrates how the defendant can verify its documents to put the plaintiff and the court in the dark. Although Schlichtmann's firm had expected a much higher settlement, the dreadful state of their finances pushed the firm to affirm a settlement from W.R. Grace for $8 million. After the settlement, the firm gathered that both companies polluted the wells is the EPA. It is a description from the Environmental Protection Agency decided that both companies had polluted the wells from the mud that had been excluded from the situation.

In conclusion, toxic tort plaintiffs in A Civil Action face a particularly challenging burden when striving to explain the causation of individual injuries. Because a plaintiff must prove by a command of the evidence that he was presented to a dangerous basis, that the defendant was liable for the danger, and that the dangerous material can and did affect the plaintiff’s injury. Additionally, the courts require very strong restraints on proof. At the same time, toxic consumption generators remain to spread chemicals into the environment. Accordingly, actual injury is determined based on proximate causation. While there is obvious proof that several children are dead and this is actual injury because it is not connected to the proximate cause, the problem is mainly dead. Schichtmann was capable to obtain a measly settlement because the companies did not want the negative rush. Had the case proceeded to the jury to conclude, the argument would have probably been capable to place some skepticism in their thoughts, driving to an undesirable outcome.