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EDWARDSVILLE, ILLINOIS -- The Madison County Courthouse is an imposing structure: a full block long, four stories high, a marble edifice built in 1921 as a symbol of the era when Madison was the most industrialized county in Illinois.

Today the county seat, Edwardsville, is home to only 21,000 people, and the surrounding county has been through a wrenching de-industrialization. Yet the county's civil courts are expanding so rapidly that the entire criminal court system is about to move to a new three-story building two blocks away in order to open up more room in the sprawling main courthouse for non-criminal trials.

You see, lawsuits are the major industry in Madison County. Business is good. Law firms are expanding to occupy former banks, former oil company headquarters, and other facilities of the old economy. Firms from other parts of the country are opening branch offices here. While the downtown shopping districts of most other small towns are all but abandoned, Edwardsville thrives. Lawyers act as the new captains of industry. One has revived a local steel mill. Another is buying a minor league baseball team.

But 160 doctors have left Madison and neighboring St. Clair Counties over the last two years. Pregnant women are now traveling as far as Nashville to get care. One reason President Bush visited the county in January was to dramatize out-of-control suits.

Madison County, Illinois has been called "the nation's leading judicial hellhole" by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Nothing much is made here any more, yet money continues to pour in from around the country. Because Madison, as one local wryly observes, has become a center of the"wealth extraction economy."

The making of lawsuit heaven

It wasn't always thus. A flat bottomland beside the Mississippi River, just a bit north of St. Louis, Madison County is where Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1802-03 before their 8,000-mile journey up the Missouri and back. By the early twentieth century, Madison and the county just south, St. Clair, had become a huge industrial annex to the thriving port of St. Louis.

Thanks to a confluence of barge traffic and a network of railroads that stretched from Chicago to New Orleans as well as east and west, the region became the home of steel mills, brass foundries, and a monstrous oil refinery. The intense industrial economy brought wealth, but also environmental woes. "My father took me out to the refinery when I was a kid, and I was sick for two days," says a veteran lawyer eating lunch at the Sunrise Cafe directly across from the courthouse. "I remember walking to school some days when you couldn't see twenty feet in front of you, the air was so filled with smoke," says Rex Carr, the legendary 78-year-old attorney and "godfather" of Madison's trial bar.

Industrial grievances soon became a local way of life. Before Worker's Compensation laws took effect across the nation between 1910 and 1920, the railroads had their own compensation system in which industrial accidents were adjudicated in the state courts. By 1915, 80 percent of the nation's railroad claims, involving accidents that occurred from Georgia to Oregon, were being resolved in Madison County. The reason was simple: Claims could be filed in any jurisdiction where the railroad did business. Since just about every railroad in the country had lines that wound through Madison, injured persons were eligible to file there--and the judges of Madison County had proven themselves particularly favorable to such appeals. Word of easy judges travels fast.

As the area's steel plants and oil refineries unionized in the '20s and '30s, Madison became a Democratic stronghold. "Even though a lot of the industries have left, this is still a union town," says Carol Foreman, executive director of the Edwardsville & Glen Carbon Chamber of Commerce. "A couple of years ago they built a Jack in the Box fast food joint out on the highway, and people wouldn't go in because the builder didn't use union labor." Illinois elects its judges, like half the states, and Madison's hard one-party cast gave its judiciary a distinct flavor. Even today, county judges proudly proclaim that their mission is to right grievances--across the entire country.

Two years ago, 73-year-old Judge Nicholas Byron, the dean of Madison's judiciary, interrupted a defense attorney who moved that the trial ought to be held where the events occurred--three states and 700 miles away in Pennsylvania--rather than in Madison County. "You know, as a result of certain events that have occurred, and most of them concern me, I have come to certain revelations," said Judge Byron. "I want this on the record ... I am not a Madison County judge.... I am concerned with all Americans. And you know what? ... I am going to expand the concept that all courts in the United States are for all citizens of the United States.... Motion denied." Judge Byron's advertising of his willingness to entertain suits from anywhere was no idle boast. At that point he was presiding over 25 percent of the national docket for cases of mesothelioma, the most deadly form of asbestos lung disease.

The tort industry

America's lawsuit industry can be divided into three spheres. First there are personal injury suits against large corporations for the products they manufacture. Second, there are medical malpractice claims against doctors and hospitals. Finally there are "class actions," which involve taking large numbers of individual claims and combining them into one giant procedure before a judge willing to "certify" the legitimacy of the claims. Fifty years ago, plaintiff attorneys who specialized in such claims were a bottom-rung contingent of the trial bar, generally dismissed by their peers as "sore-back lawyers." "When I started this practice in 1950, I grossed $500 the first year," says the silver-haired Carr, who twice held the Guinness World Record for the world's largest damage claim. "After I finished my day in court, I would go over to the stockyards and chop ice from 3 to 11 so I could make a living." An East St. Louis native, Cart still maintains his two-story office in that tumble-down shell of a city where, right across the street, an abandoned 12-story apartment house has closed off portions of Missouri Avenue because it rains bricks on the sidewalk.

Carr got his first big break when a client for whom he was handling a bankruptcy stopped at a gas station and heard a story from the attendant, whose son had suffered a railroad injury. The client lied and said he knew a great railroad lawyer. "I had never handled a railroad case in my life," Carr recounts, "but I started doing research and settled the case for $30,000." Soon he was representing a string of railroad workers in personal injury suits before sympathetic Madison and St. Clair County judges.

"Tort" is the legal term for a damaging action for which one can be held liable. Tort law--like many other parts of the legal profession--changed drastically in the 1960s. The revolt began in academia, where Yale law professor Fleming James crusaded for expanded workplace liability so that employers would be responsible for every accident, regardless of fault. James "conceived the principal function of tort law to be, not the resolution of disputes ... or the expression of moral values, but compensation of the injured," in the words of George Priest, John Olin Professor of Law and Economics and Yale Law School. lames' crusade was amplified by Friedrich Kessler, a refugee from Germany who--misreading his experience with the Nazis--became obsessed with the notion that "powerful commercial overlords" were imposing "a new feudal order upon a vast host of vassals." Soon, legal academics had convinced many judges and attorneys that even if a manufacturer or individual "has exercised all possible care in the preparation and sale of his product," a doctrine of"strict liability" should hold him responsible for any harm that comes from using the product.

Lawyers or banker?

In 1964, Dr. Irving Selikoff of the NYU School of Medicine published a study that found lung cancer rates seven times higher than expected in insulation workers in New Jersey. By 1967, the government warned that asbestos might be the cause, and it was banned in 1978. Since then, 750,000 compensation claims, paying out $70 billion, have been filed by Americans exposed to asbestos. Another half million suits are pending. Asbestos has proven to be the greatest industrial disaster in American history, bankrupting hordes of companies.