Word: sterne
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gerald Stern was 33 years old, a 1961 graduate of Harvard Law School, a veteran of the early '60s civil rights protests as a lawyer with the Justice Dept. In 1972 he was, to put it frankly, looking for a cause: Arnold & Porter, the big Washington law firm where he worked, allowed some of its lawyers to tackle their own public interest cases every year. It was his year, and in Buffalo Creek's survivors he found his cause. For the more than 600 people he would represent, Stern and the lawyers who worked under him would...
...could win his clients all that money he would have to overcome several barriers, not the least of which was the high-priced and high-powered legal talent of the Pittston Company's resources. Few people, attorneys or laymen, write lucidly about the intricacies of the law, but Stern's book is easily comprehensible, and even exciting. Stern writes with almost clinical detail of the two Pittston legal strategems he discredited. The first was the "act of God" theory. Stern proved that the disaster was the result of Pittston negligence, and when the company tried then to show that...
What makes the $13.5 million judgement especially remarkable is that Stern won it mainly through pleading what he termed psychic impairment. At first the Pittston attorneys characterized this as mere "puff and blow," until witnesses' breakdowns during hearings convinced Judge K.K. Hall that this was not so. Teams led by prominent psychologists (including Harvard's Robert Coles) found anxiety symptoms in all survivors of the flood, even those who had made it to safety. They watched friends and relatives carried out of their arms, or pulled older folks out of the water with bodies smashed, to have them die from...
...Stern obviously has immense compassion for the people he represented. But it is only when he begins to detail his compassion that the book drags. He talks about his sympathy for the underdog, even to the point of writing that as a child, "I never liked the Yankees because they won all the time." At times he is unbelievably patronizing toward his clinets, to the effect "that the tall towering mountains make it impossible to see the horizon, easy to lose hope," or quoting John Denver's stupid song, "Country Road...
Faced with rising budget deficits, many states and cities are, indeed, getting unusually tough with their employees. What is more, officials are enjoying wide public support as they take stern measures to hold the line on wages, cut back on overtime, lay off workers, demand greater productivity and fire public servants who walk off their jobs despite the existence of no-strike laws...