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A Measure of Endurance: The Unlikely Triumph of Steven Sharp.

Article Excerpt
The current fight over tort law is not the first--but a new book may register the strongest resonance yet with lawyers, potential jurors, and policy-makers on both sides of the debate.

A Measure of Endurance: The Unlikely Triumph of Steven Sharp, tells the story that helped move President Bill Clinton to veto the Product Liability Reform Act of 1997.

As Sharp testified at a Senate Commerce Committee bearing, "If this bill would have been in effect when my accident happened, I would not have had my day in court. And I needed it. And everybody else like me does, too."

His case also led ATLA to establish an annual award in Sharp's name, honoring lawyers and their clients whose cases illustrate the civil justice system at its best. But nothing has brought his story home to mainstream America as forcefully as this book.

In the summer between his sophomore and junior years in high school, Sharp lost both arms when the tractor that drove the hay baler he was cleaning suddenly self started and, as he put it, "the baler are my hands." The 17-year-old boy, who had operated farm machinery since he was 9, insisted he had turned off the power before hopping off to clean the baler. In fact, the same self-start problem had been at issue when a man's arm was mangled in 1986 and when another farmer was decapitated in 1990.

Three years after Sharp filed suit in 1993, the trial jury awarded him several million dollars, finding the tractor maker negligent in its product's design and warnings. Three more years passed before the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously upheld the verdict. (Sharp ex rel. Gordon v. Case Corp., 595 N.W.2d 380 (Wis. 1999).)

It would have cost the manufacturer 70 cents to fix the defective part; as of autumn 2002, when the book was...

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