The Woburn Story

A Project for Professor Nesson's Winter Evidence Class, January 1999

This web site is the product of an experiment conducted by students in Professor Charles Nesson's evidence class at Harvard Law School. It investigates the effects of judicial discretion on trial outcomes, particularly in the context of scientific evidence questions. The experiment uses the facts of a lawsuit filed in 1982, surrounding events that occurred in Woburn, Massachusetts and from which the movie A Civil Action was produced. Readers who wish to skip directly to the results of the experiment and a discussion of its implications may do so by activating the link at the bottom of this page. For those who would like to know more about the facts of the case and would like to participate in the experiment, please proceed ahead and vote solely according to the information presented to you. Students and teachers should feel free to use this site in their own explorations. We hope others will refine our methods and test our findings more rigorously.

Team Members: Ted Chandler Andrew Cheng Jason Conger Jocelyn Dabeau Gabriel Gray John McMullan Dorothy Mares Stacy Menechios Antoun Nabhan Hymie Workie Jennifer Yates