Word: torts
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...enormous success. By the hundreds of thousands, workmen and their families poured out of the sweaty city to this marvel of a beach. You can still see it today. True, gone are the legions of sailor-suited college students picking up trash. Gone too, in this age of tort, the archery range and roller rink. But the rest is there, a grand beach park for yet another generation of working-class New Yorkers, with Hispanics and blacks now joining the original beach population of white ethnics...
...arrogance alienates him from his wife (Isabella Rossellini) and son. They -- like John Turturro's determinedly patient psychiatrist, a specialist in traumatic stress, and Tom Hulce's determinedly impatient tort lawyer, trying to extract a settlement from the airline -- would prefer a more humble and malleable response to a near death experience...
Adapting a best seller for the movies is like carving flesh down to bone. You keep the skeleton, then apply rouge and silicone until the creature looks human. Any screenwriter adapting the 500-page novel The Firm, John Grisham's tort thriller about tax attorneys fronting for the Mafia, would try to streamline the story, infuse action into a narrative that is mostly lawyers chatting, give an emotional history to characters who are basically plot props and . . . please, a new ending. Grisham spun a lovely yarn -- the venality, the conspiracy, the flypaper guilt -- then let it unravel at the denouement...
...what to think, for example, about the new area of litigious behavior that has blossomed and might be dubbed emotional tort law? Last March Julie Rems, 26, who is deaf, competed in the early rounds of a Miss America contest in Culver City, Calif. Though she was warned that Miss America rules precluded anyone assisting her onstage, Rems nonetheless brought on an interpreter who helped her lip-read questions. Rems lost the contest and sued the pageant committee and others, charging violation of her civil rights as well as "embarrassment, humiliation and degradation." The case has not yet come...
...made the lawsuit business a battleground for greedy practitioners. The survey firm Jury Verdict Research estimates that jury awards to plaintiffs of $1 million or more leaped from 22 in 1974 to 558 in 1989. Those figures may be one reason why Congress is now considering a national tort-reform law aimed at restricting frivolous litigation. There is surely something new in the American air that inspired the estate of Christopher Duffy of Framingham, Mass., who stole a car from a parking lot and got killed in a subsequent accident, to sue the proprietor of the lot for failing...