The Law: Those Cases That Go On and On

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in the course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means . . . Innumerable, children have been born into the cause. . . innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit

There are not three Jarndyces left upon the. earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court.

—Bleak House

Charles Dickens may have entertained some hope of reforming the tradition-encrusted lethargy of the law when he burlesqued its expensive inefficiencies in his 1853 novel Bleak House. But traditions have a way of enduring. New details need to be checked, new issues analyzed; more lawyers are hired to battle more attorneys on the other side. The Guinness Book of World Records gives its longevity award to a lawsuit that was filed in Poona, India, in 1205 and not settled until 1966.* In France, Attorney Jean d'Everlange vividly recalls the "Santoni affair," a controversy over the ownership of some

Corsican forests, which lasted from 1830 until 1975. Says he: "This case was slightly painful at first, then quite painful and finally, most painful indeed."

In the U.S. today, litigation is steadily becoming more complicated, more pervasive, more time consuming and more expensive. That fact is clear enough to any ordinary citizen with a tax problem or a difficult divorce, and no one has expressed more concern about it than Chief Justice Warren Burger. His warning: "We may be well on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated." The warning is somewhat exaggerated, but some major American cases do indeed keep expanding until they become ends in themselves, seemingly capable of lasting forever. Three classic cases in the making:

BATTLE FOR INFORMATION. The longest court trial in U.S. history has just entered its third year of testimony, and the end of the prosecution case is not yet at hand. Perhaps this fall, defendant International Business Machines Corp. will begin submitting evidence to refute U.S. Justice Department claims that the company has "monopolized or attempted to monopolize" the general purpose digital-computer market. This defense effort is expected to require another three or four more courtroom years. At a pretrial hearing in 1973, U.S. Judge David Edelstein doggedly forecast that he would "prove the legal system is so advanced and so so phisticated that there is no case that's unmanageable." The verdict on that is not yet in.

Ironically, the IBM case would not have been possible before the advent of the computer. The sheer numbers involved are staggering. IBM supplied an estimated 60 million pages of documents and other computer concerns provided 115 million more. The courtroom has now seen 4 million of those pages, through 50 witnesses and about 4,000 exhibits and 50,000 stenographic transcript pages of testimony; IBM has listed 350 additional witnesses for future swearing.