Modern Trials

by Melvin M. Belli

Melvin Mouron Belli ( 1907 – 1996) was a prominent American lawyer known as "The King of Torts" and by detractors as 'Melvin Bellicose'. He had many celebrity clients, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Errol Flynn, Chuck Berry, Muhammad Ali, Sirhan Sirhan, the Rolling Stones, Jim Bakker and, Martha Mitchell, Lana Turner, Tony Curtis, and Mae West.He won over USD $600,000,000 in judgments during his legal career.He was born in the California Gold Rush town of Sonora, California in the Sierra foothills. His parents were of Italian ancestry By the 1920s, the family had moved to the city of Stockton, California where he attended Stockton High School. He graduated from the U C, Berkeley in 1929, traveled the world for a year, attended Law school at Berkeley After graduation, his first job was posing as a hobo for the Works Progress Administration and riding the rails to observe the Depression's impact on the country's vagrant population. His first major legal victory was a personal injury lawsuit representing an injured cable car gripman. Over insurance lawyers' objections, Belli brought a model of a cable car intersection, and the gear box and chain involved in the accident, to demonstrate to jurors exactly what had happened. Besides his notorious personal injury cases, he was instrumental in setting up some of the foundations of modern consumer rights law, arguing several cases in the 1940s and 1950s that formed the basis for later lawsuits and landmark litigation by such figures as Ralph Nader. Belli argued (in cases such as Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co., in 1944, which arose from an incident in which a restaurant manager from Merced, California was injured by an exploding Coca-Cola bottle) that all products have an implied warranty, that it is to be foreseen that products will be used by a long chain of people, not just the direct recipient of the manufactured product, and that negligence by a defendant need not be proven if the defendant's product is defective.

Textbook Binding

Published June 1, 2000