62 pages 2 hours read

Jonathan Harr

A Civil Action

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1995

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Rule 11

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Summary: “Rule 11”

1

 

Jerome Facher is a lawyer from the firm of Hale and Dorr. He also taught a course in trial practice at Harvard. Facher is in his sixties and has a reputation for being a tough professor, a tougher boss, and a formidable, brawling lawyer. When the Woburn case lands on his desk, he has to respond, because the J.J. Riley Tannery is one of Hale and Dorr’s clients. He sends Neil Jacobs, one of the junior partners, to Woburn to meet with John J. Riley.

 

Riley is a hotheaded man in his fifties who is proud of his business and has little patience for environmental regulation. He sees all environmentalism as a conspiracy intended to cut into his bottom line. Years earlier the state had decreed that J.J. Riley Tannery had to build a million-dollar, waste-treatment facility. Because he couldn’t afford it, he sold the tannery to Beatrice Foods. He had stayed on to manage and was paid well.

 

Riley tells Jacobs that he has never used TCE, and never dumped any chemicals on the property. When Jacobs asks about the fifteen acres of land that the report cites as the source of the TCE contamination, Riley says the land is completely undeveloped and is nothing but woods.