Civil Action Movie Vs Book

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Over the last several decades, many important events from throughout our history have been transformed into motion pictures. Some of these events have been depicted in a documentary style while others have been dramatized to please a general audience. One such film piqued my interest, the story behind the movie A Civil Action, directed by Steven Zaillian. As an Environmental Studies major I felt this subject, and the research needed to uncover the true story, would prove beneficial to my future course work. The decontamination of the area surrounding wells G and H in Woburn, Massachusetts, was one of the largest environmental cleanup sites in history at the time. Through my research, I began to realize what an undertaking it must have been …show more content…

Grace, both Fortune 500 companies. Although both the movie and book are based on the same idea, the book is considered to be a much more accurate portrayal of the real life events. Ken Shulman states in a Newsweek article, where the attorneys and real life parents revisit the event, that Anne Andersen “considered the book an accurate account of the excruciating Woburn case.” In the movie, the families of the prosecution were portrayed as a helpless group of grieving parents that had pleaded for Jan Schlictmann to take their case. This portrayal is contradictory to the book, in which author Jonathan Harr goes to great length to describe the process that both Anne and her community went through in their discoveries. The cluster of leukemia cases in the neighborhood that the Andersen’s lived was 7 times higher than the national average, reported public affairs professor Allan Mazur. The details leading up to this discovery were completely absent from the …show more content…

The first part of the trial consisted of 77 days of testimony from experts. Jurors were expected to comprehend all of the information being presented and commit the details to memory. Hydrology professors Scott Bair and Maura Metheny note, “Jurors are handicapped learners who must rely solely on their collective memories of what was said by witnesses. In this case, society asked the jury to comprehend the equivalent of a coursework master’s degree in hydrology” (Lessons). Contributing to the confusion, the information presented to the jury by the hydrology experts was not collaborative and the jurors were left to sort out the “facts” for themselves. Mazur adds, “It would be a useful exercise to compare the Woburn trial with trials that have used science to better effect.” Jerome Facher affirms that the Woburn case should be an example used to illustrate the legal system’s imperfections and adds that the case “is required reading in over 50 law schools” (Grossman

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