BOOK CHANGING HOW LAW TAUGHT AROUND NATION.

Byline: William Glaberson The New York Times

The best seller ``A Civil Action'' tells the true story of a battle between a bold but flawed plaintiff lawyer named Jan Schlichtmann and two big corporations over whether they polluted the drinking water of Woburn, Mass. In the movie that is opening in theaters now, John Travolta portrays Schlichtmann as, if anything, bolder and more flawed.

But in professor Lewis Grossman's class at American University's law school in Washington - and at law schools across the country - Schlichtmann is already a star, foibles and all.

Jonathan Harr's 1995 book about the lawsuit over the leukemia deaths of Woburn children is playing an extraordinary role in what some legal educators describe as a movement to modernize the training of lawyers in America. Across the country, ``A Civil Action'' is required reading in courses in at least 50 law schools, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Georgetown and American University, where it is read in some civil procedures classes, one of the most important an aspiring lawyer will take.

The widespread use of Harr's book illustrates how extensively legal educators have been searching for ways to modify the traditional method of teaching law, made famous in the 1973 movie ``The Paper Chase.'' For most of this century, ``case method'' has dominated the training of lawyers. It requires students to read scores of appeals court decisions - and little else - and then fend off withering questions from professors.

`` `The Paper Chase' is dead,'' said Zygmunt Plater, a professor at Boston College Law School who uses Harr's book in his courses. ``The old war-of-attrition game of wits where the teacher was saying `I'm smarter than anybody' was shown to be a foolish waste. What you want to do is engage students actively, and this book does it.''

At the time of ``The Paper Chase,'' most students at law schools across the country took only courses based on the traditional case method, and it was common to graduate from law school without having ever seen a real legal pleading document, met a client or learned much about the real-world workings of the legal system other than through pronouncements of appeals courts reprinted in textbooks.

The case method is still prevalent. But even the courses using it now often include other approaches, such as the study of documents from litigation. And by the time they graduate after three years, most students have taken several courses experimenting with new teaching methods. At graduation, many students have not only seen legal documents, many have drafted them for real clients in clinical courses.

Proponents of the traditional method say it teaches students to think like lawyers. But critics have said for years that it leaves young lawyers with little appreciation of how to deal with people who become entangled in the legal system.

Appetite was there

Harr's book, said Grossman, arrived just when legal educators were developing an appetite for something like it.

``The top-down, principle-heavy way of teaching law was starting to crumble, and professors were starting to question whether it was working anymore,'' he said. ``You can view this as a revolution in law teaching.''

To the consternation of some traditional educators, law schools recently have tried other new approaches, like computer simulations of cases and role playing.

Some law schools have even introduced classes on literature in which students read books like Herman Melville's ``Billy Budd'' and ``To Kill a Mockingbird'' by Harper Lee and then discuss the legal and ethical issues.

Before ``A Civil Action,'' some professors had used other books about lawsuits. But few of those had drawn anywhere near as much attention in law schools as Harr's book. Some legal educators say his vivid portrait of the innards of a lawsuit is providing a model of how to teach legal principles through narratives that show students the effect of the law on people, like the anguished Woburn families of ``A Civil Action.''

``For me,'' said Carrie Menkel-Meadow, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who uses the book in her classes, ``it is putting flesh on the bones of what practicing law is all about: the people in cases.''

Harr also described the real-world complexities of lawyers' motivations. Schlichtmann was portrayed as an ambitious lawyer who wanted to profit handsomely by doing good works. Harr's narrative dwells on the expensive Porsche that Schlichtmann drove and the exclusive restaurants he frequented.

In Grossman's civil procedure class at American University's Washington College of Law, the students referred to the participants in the Woburn case by name, as if they knew them. They giggled at the mention of some of the players in the legal drama.

During the class, Grossman referred in detail to a series of moves by Schlichtmann and his adversaries. Why, for example, he asked his students, had Schlichtmann chosen the two corporate defendants, W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods, to sue when there were many industrial polluters in Woburn?

A student raised his hand. ``Money. Money,'' he said. ``They had deep pockets.''

Best and worst

After class, one student, Jackie Hershkowitz, said: `` `A Civil Action' shows the best and the worst of the legal profession. Schlichtmann himself represents those two extremes.''

Some legal educators, like Richard Hausler, a professor at the University of Miami Law School for the past 51 years, say they worry that the new teaching methods might turn out lawyers who do not understand legal principles thoroughly.

``I can't have them go out and be sociologists and all that jazz unless they have learned the fundamentals,'' Hausler said.

At law schools from coast to coast, though, the fascination with the Woburn case goes far beyond simply reading the book. Students study original legal filings from the case. There are Internet sites filled with the scientific evidence from the trial.

Grossman and a colleague from the American University law school, Robert Vaughn, went to a federal document center near Boston to retrieve scores of the original documents from the suit. They are now working on a legal textbook dealing entirely with the Woburn case to be published by one of the major law text publishers, Foundation Press.

For the past two years, both professors have been assigning the original legal documents as well as Harr's book as required reading in courses on the rules of civil law practice that they structure entirely around the case.