REVISITING "A CIVIL ACTION" A DECADE LATER-A NEW TOOL FOR INTEGRATIVE STUDIES

The book and movie "A Civil Action" by Jonathan Harr (1995) and Touchstone Pictures (1998), that chronicled the Woburn, Massachusetts, toxic-tort trial has been widely used as a case study for environmental geology and legal courses. Most courses describe the complexity of the issues surrounding the environmental assessment of the Aberjona River Valley and the pumping of Wells G & H, or the legal decisions of Judge Skinner, who presided over the case, but few present a comprehensive, integrated assessment of the scientific, social, and legal aspects of Woburn's contaminated drinking water.

‘A Civil Action-The Woburn Toxic Trial' is a website nearing final development at Ohio State University in cooperation with Carleton College's Science Education Resource Center (SERC) with the support of a National Science Foundation grant. The web-based resource provides holistic information in an integrative format to help instructors lead students through the complexities of the Woburn issues allowing students to critically evaluate the conditions and who could or should be responsible for the cities higher than normal number of cancer victims. The culmination of the learning exercises is a mock trial where students use learned skills related to scientific arguments, legal processes and procedures, and evaluations of citizen/government/corporation responsibilities. There are multiple themes instructors can emphasize using the site's various resources, which include information regarding a long history of Woburn's industrial pollution that was largely ignored by the city, strategies employed by the defendants (Beatrice Foods, Inc. and W.R. Grace & Co.) to cast doubt regarding their sole responsibility for the pollution and how Woburn citizens organized to access the cancer cluster's and project potential sources of the cancers. Students can explore these themes online where there are copies of newspaper articles published during the trial, trial and deposition transcripts, assessment data presented in court used to determine the impacts to groundwater and Woburn's citizens' drinking water, and other historic documents and photographs, as they develop their strategies toward enacting the mock trial. More information about the website can be found at http://serc.carleton.edu/woburn/about.html.