On March 9, 1976, an explosion in the Scotia mine in eastern Kentucky widowed 15 women. They asked Stern, a public interest lawyer, to represent them in suing the coal company based on his successful fight against the corporate coal companies that he’d recounted in his book The Buffalo Creek Disaster
. Here Stern offers a spare, lucid account of how the widows won a lawsuit against their husbands’ employer despite obstacles that included community obloquy for suing the job-providing mining company, unfavorable laws designed to protect corporate mining, abusive defense tactics and the active hostility of the trial judge. What sets Stern’s effort apart from other David and Goliath legal stories is his impressive ability to explain in the simplest language complex legal issues, trial dynamics and strategy, and the role played by the intangibles of personality, bias and local culture in a lawsuit’s outcome. Stern is also adept at keeping himself out of the story and allowing readers to come to their own conclusions based on the facts of the case and the moving words of the widows. (Aug. 26)
