A Documentary Companion to a Civil Action: With Notes, Comments, and Questions

Do the events in this case and the history prior to it have anything to with the Whitey Bulger case? In 1994 a man who worked for Grace appeared in a local newspaper story about his search for his unknown father and all the obstacles in his path. Not 6 months later Whitey vanishes and Harr's book comes out. The man had also written an autobiographical account in which early years in Woburn is mentioned prior to this book. As things heated up over the Bulger case AND in the movie adaptation of Harr's book, the man became mired in the resulting confusion and old 'friends' began exhibiting strange behavior. Some of these friends appeared as possible plants to keep an eye on the boy(now a man) and to report back info to various parties for review and countermeasures, as of the boy was collateral against key players in the Bulger case with a link to the Woburn cancer tragedy discussed here. Is it possible a child involved in the Woburn tragedy has been monitored and reported on by individuals directly or indirectly linked to one or more agencies with an interest in the Bulger case? If so, has such a child been targeted and to thwart any attention to such a possibility-- discreet,planned documentary evidence been fabricated to suggest otherwise, such as conversations steered to counter such charges then recorded without the man's knowledge or permission under a cloak of ComSec or other security provisions? Far-fetched? Consider that many of the key players in the Bulger case hail from the areas affected by the Woburn case. It is alleged the man was also targeted for surveillance by an older man in his 50s(estimate) with TN license plates who claimed to work 'construction' around the time Barry Mawn was moved to the Boston FBI office AND is a Woburn native!

Pay attention to the descriptions above so that you'll know what you're getting. This book is intended for law students or other legal-minded professionals, or only the most die-hard and detail-oriented of laypeople. The word "documentary" in the title will disappoint you if the documentaries that usually interest you are on the History Channel. This book is primarily a compilation of actual court pleadings... you know, those long, verbose, lawyer-written legal-brief-type arguments that have the party names at the top and usually begin with "comes now, Anne Andersen, Plaintiff, who alleges and would show this Court the following..." yadda yadda. Granted, you would never get to see this stuff if the author had not painstakingly gone through the court's casefiles and selected the best documents, but what you're reading is exactly that: the highlights of the court file. If you've never had the desire to show up at the federal courthouse, ask to see the casefile for Anderson v. Cryovac (assuming they'd let you), wait for them to haul the boxes in from the warehouse (remember the forklift at the end of the movie?) and then page through the documents one by one for days on end, then this book will probably not intrigue you. If the thought of paging through the history of these proceedings does interest you, then by all means, get this book. If nothing else, it will show the lawyer how much worse his/her life could be, it will show the law student how complex a case like this can be, and it will give the layperson an appreciation for just how much work can and does go into a lawsuit like this.

I have used this book very successfully to introduce business students to the realities of law. It's a particularly useful supplement for business law texts which tend to treat law as a set of rules to be memorized.