Up A Creek Without A Lawyer

Today is the anniversary of the Buffalo Creek Flood of 1972, in which a dam owned by the Pittsston Coal Company in Logan County, West Virginia burst, sending a wall of water downstream that killed 125 people and wiped out a mining town.

I remember that as part of law school orientation we were compelled to read a book called The Buffalo Creek Disaster, written by the lawyer who represented the victims and their families in going after Pittston. I'm not sure whether this exercise was meant to instill in us newbie 1-L's a sense of rah-rah public spiritedness (plucky Little Guy vs. Snidely Whiplash) or else to expose us to the ins and outs of front-line legal practice (all the cases settled for a modest wodge of dosh). I'm afraid all it really instilled in me was a fear that it would turn up on some final exam somewhere.

I have to admit that although I'm a lawyer and I love to read, I hate reading lawyer books, whether they be memoirs by people like Dershowitz or David Bois, or fiction by people like Grisham or Turow. People keep giving them to me, but they all wind up on the "not gonna bother" shelf. The only exception to my bar on books-about-lawyers-or-the-law is, of course, the great John Mortimer. (And yes, I hate movies and tee vee shows about lawyers, too.)