About the Project    Supporting Organizations    People    Contact Information Even before the publication of Jonathan Harr's national best seller, A Civil Action in 1995, the case of Anne Anderson v. W.R. Grace and Co. was receiving national attention, from weekly news magazine shows to specialized legal publications. With the publication of Harr's book and the upcoming release of the motion picture, the impact of the case has grown and will continue to grow, exponentially. Soon tens of millions of people—from the public at large to the legal profession—will be familiar with the case. Yet, as people use the case as a vehicle for discussion about our legal system, and as teachers incorporate the case into their curriculum, the resources necessary to enrich the debate are not always available. Casual readers of the book become interested in the legal issues, but have no way to learn more about them. Teachers want access to interviews of participants and trial transcripts, but are frustrated in their attempts to find them. The lessons from Woburn project was born of both of these concerns. With access to the original participants in the case, hundreds of primary documents , the connective power of the Internet and the resources of two major universities, the project will provide information needed to turn the interest that A Civil Action has created into a powerful teaching tool. First, the project will create a clearinghouse of information on the Internet about the case. Second, in late January, the project will host a live conference, called "A Civil Re-Action," that will bring together for the first time all the case's major participants. Third, the project will generate a series of on-line discussions and mini-seminars designed to engage the public with the legal and moral issues raised by the case. Finally, the project will develop a prototype of the next generation of law school materials based on the case: Following a model used successfully at Harvard Business School, a team of professors from Harvard and Seattle (all authors of major legal textbooks) will marshal resources from all media from the book and feature film to videotape interviews and trial transcripts—to develop an entire civil procedure curriculum based around this case. At a time when public interest in the law has been heightened by a number high-profile cases, the Lessons from Woburn project will provide a much-needed opportunity for learning about the substantive issues of the law. Equally important, by engaging those outside of the legal community in debates that rarely make it outside of law school walls, the initiative will be an opportunity for the legal system to be opened up to the citizens it serves. As a whole, the project will advance the Berkman Center's efforts to use the internet as a tool to foster civic engagement and education within and beyond the Harvard community, and will further the Films for Justice Institute's mission of training ethical lawyers through visual media.