A lawsuit or (much less commonly) "suit in law" is a civil action brought in a court of law in which a plaintiff, a party who claims to have incurred loss as a result of a defendant's actions, demands a legal or equitable remedy. The defendant is required to respond to the plaintiff's complaint. If the plaintiff is successful, judgment will be given in the plaintiff's favor, and a variety of court orders may be issued to enforce a right, award damages, or impose a temporary or permanent injunction to prevent an act or compel an act. A declaratory judgment may be issued to prevent future legal disputes. Although not as common, lawsuit may also refer to a criminal action, criminal proceeding, or criminal claim.

A lawsuit may involve dispute resolution of private law issues between individuals, business entities or non-profit organizations. A lawsuit may also enable the state to be treated as if it were a private party in a civil case, as plaintiff or defendant regarding an injury, or may provide the state with a civil cause of action to enforce certain laws.

Jan Richard Schlichtmann (born March 16 1951) is an American attorney specializing in personal injury law and toxic torts. He was educated at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, B.A., and Cornell University, J.D., and was admitted to the bar in 1977.

German American attorney Schlichtmann became famous in the 1980s as a result of his lawsuit against W. R. Grace and Beatrice Co. (Anderson v. Cryovac) alleging that chemicals from these companies had contaminated drinking water in a town north of Boston, Woburn, Massachusetts. Extensive tests by Schlichtmann's experts and the Harvard School of Public Health showed that defendants W. R. Grace and Beatrice Co. had polluted Woburn's water with dangerous levels of various carcinogenic chemicals.

The contamination is alleged to have resulted in the deaths of children from leukemia. This civil action case, often referred to as "Woburn," was chronicled in the 1995 book A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr, which in turn was made into a film starring John Travolta as Schlichtmann.

Daniel Robert "Danny" Elfman (born May 29, 1953) is an American composer, best known for scoring music for television and film and creating The Simpsons main title theme as well as the 1989 Batman movie theme. He was the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band Oingo Boingo, from 1976 to 1995. He has scored the majority of the films for his long-time friend Tim Burton.

Born in Los Angeles, he entered the film industry in 1976, initially as an actor. He made his film scoring début in in 1980 for the film Forbidden Zone directed by his older brother Richard Elfman. He has since been nominated for four Academy Awards and won a Grammy Award for Tim Burton's Batman and an Emmy Award for his Desperate Housewives theme. Elfman was honored with the prestigious Richard Kirk award at the 2002 BMI Film and TV Awards. The award is given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music.

Elfman was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Blossom Elfman (née Bernstein), a writer and teacher, and Milton Elfman, a teacher who was in the Air Force. Elfman grew up in a racially mixed community in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles. He spent much of his time in the local movie theatre, adoring the music of such film composers as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman.

Jonathan Harr is an American writer, best known for A Civil Action.

Harr was born in Beloit, Wisconsin. His sister, Cynthia Lauwers, lives in North Andover, Massachusetts. He lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he has taught nonfiction writing at Smith College. He is a former staff writer at New England Monthly and has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Harr spent approximately seven and a half years researching and writing A Civil Action, which was published in 1995, and subsequently nominated for a National Book Award, and awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. John Travolta and Robert Duvall starred in the film of the same name, and Robert Redford was on the production team. Harr later wrote The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece in 2005, which became a best seller.

Jonathan Harr:Author spotlight

Kyle Smith (born 1966) is an American critic, novelist and essayist. He is a staff film critic for the New York Post. His film reviewing style has been called "an exercise in hilarious hostility" by Entertainment Weekly and he has been dubbed "America's most cantankerous film critic" by The Atlantic. He has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal,People magazine,New York magazine, The New York Times, and The Weekly Standard.

Smith was graduated from East Longmeadow (Massachusetts) High School in 1984. Following that, he was graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and is a former U.S. Army lieutenant and veteran of the Persian Gulf War. From 1996 to 2005 he worked at People magazine, where he was the editor of the book and music reviews.

Kyle Smith has published two books in addition to criticism, newspaper and magazine features and essays.

His first book, Love Monkey, a comic novel about a cynical, self-deprecating journalist named Tom Farrell and his romantic tribulations in New York City, was published by William Morrow in 2004. A New York Times article cast the book as a guys' version of such popular novels as Bridget Jones's Diary and Melissa Bank's, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing and cited Nick Hornby's books About a Boy and High Fidelity as inspiration for Love Monkey. Times critic Janet Maslin called the book "hilarious".Entertainment Weekly called the book "relentlessly cynical" and concluded that "'Monkey,' like the paper Tom writes for, is loud and brash, but a helluva lot of fun".Time magazine said, "You couldn't ask for a more entertaining drinking buddy--watch out for a memorable strip-club meltdown scene--but there's a deep, dark subway of despair running underneath his riffs, and that's what makes the book more than a standup routine....'Love Monkey' nails it."