Melvin Muron Belli

Besides his personal injury cases, which earned for him his byname "King of Torts," Belli 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. In his book Ready for the Plaintiff, Belli noted examples of negligence cited by himself and other personal-injury lawyers to win in court—for example, a colleague in Florida, who showed how a builder violated a building code in Miami Beach concerning the use of wooden shims in construction of outside walls (forbidden by the municipal code because of the effect of the ocean salt and air). The facing was a slab of Vitreous marble, whose adhesion was eventually weakened by the climate; it fell off the side of the building and injured a passerby, who sued the builder. After winning a court case, Belli would raise a Jolly Roger flag over his Montgomery Street office building in the Barbary Coast district of San Francisco (which Belli claimed had been a Gold Rush-era brothel) and fire a cannon, mounted on his office roof, to announce the victory and the impending party. In his best-known case, Belli represented Jack Ruby, for free, after Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Belli attempted to prove that Ruby was legally insane and had a history of mental illness in his family. On Saturday, March 14, 1964, Ruby was convicted of "murder with malice", and received a death sentence. Immediately thereafter, Ruby and his siblings fired Belli as they also hired and fired several other lawyers during the case. In late 1966, Ruby's conviction was overturned with help from other defense lawyers on the grounds that he did not receive a fair trial and a retrial was scheduled outside of Dallas, but Ruby died of cancer before the retrial could take place. Belli became very critical of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.[citation needed] Belli's firm filed for bankruptcy protection in December 1995. Belli was representing 800 women in a class action lawsuit against breast implant manufacturer Dow Corning. Belli won the lawsuit, but when Dow Corning declared bankruptcy, Belli had no way to recover the US$5,000,000 his firm had advanced to doctors and expert witnesses. In the 1960s, Belli was among the leading members of the California plaintiffs bar who helped establish the California Trial Lawyers Association, which in the mid-1990s was renamed the Consumer Attorneys of California. The organization was established to help set standards and foment on-going legal education to help consumers have a better chance in court against the powerful legal teams amassed by the insurance companies and big corporations that typically were the defendants in accident, personal injury and other consumer lawsuits.