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A Civil Action: Anderson Vs. Cryovac Case

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In the movie, A Civil Action, the story follows a case from back in the day called Anderson vs. Cryovac. The case was conducted in a federal courthouse, John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, which is located in Boston Massachusetts. The case lasted about 2 months, September 3rd to November 5th, in 1986. The lawsuit was underlining the toxic contamination of groundwater in Woburn, Massachusetts. The prosecutors were Anne Anderson and various other families from Woburn, Massachusetts. The defendants associated with this case, included Beatrice Foods, Cryovac and UniFirst. The prosecution team sued the defendants for the causing contaminated water and a cancer cluster in their town. The main source of contamination was the tannery owned …show more content…

The four major acts and laws made were the Clean Water Act, Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act(CERCLA), The Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA), and Hazardous Ranking System(HRS). The Clean Water Act is to renovate and maintain the nation's water by averting point and nonpoint pollution sources. In integration, this act does not address groundwater contamination directly because that is something addressed in a different act. This act establishes the rudimentary standards for surface water. This act was made in 1948 but changed drastically in the 1970s. Next, the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, also known as CERCLA is fundamentally a tax. CERCLA taxes chemical and petroleum industries. In five years over one billion dollars were accumulated in taxes. Most of that money went towards a trust fund that benefited clean hazardous wastes. This trust fund provides for cleanup, if no party is responsible for the wastes that go into the groundwater. Next, the superfund amendments and reauthorization act fundamentally amended the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act. It also revised the hazardous ranking system. For starters, it inclined the trust from 1.6 billion dollars to 8.5 billion dollars. SARA got the public more involved in the decisions on how to purify waste sites. This act made CERCLA rethink their standards and visually think about and realize whether or not they were still good standards. Also it enlarged the focus of human health. Lastly, hazardous ranking system which is better known as HRS optically analyzes hazardous waste lands decides if it should go on the national priority list(NPL). This system goes and ranks how deplorable a waste land is and puts them on a list to be cleaned immediately. The higher on the list a waste

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The book A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr explains the predicament of a lawyer who rejected a case that was very risky and complicated as a personal injury lawyer. Through various legal concepts and terminologies discussed in class, the story details how the judicial system operates. Particularly, the case involves victims of childhood leukemia in the small town of Woburn, Massachusetts, where the city wells have been found to be contaminated with tetrachloroethylene (TCE) — a suspected carcinogen and other industrial byproducts. (Glantz, 1998). Two of the largest corporations, companies names, each with a plant near the wells were accused of being responsible.

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