'He has made a lot of legal history. For the last 20 or 30 years he's been there when a lot of people haven't, with ideas that a lot of people didn't have or were too timid to try.'

Paul Sugarman, former president

  of the Massachussetts Bar Association

Will the real Melvin Belli please stand up?

Is it Belli, "the King of Torts," counselor to Errol Flynn, Martha Mitchell, and the Rolling Stones and as colorful as all of them, the Muhammed Ali of the bar--a superstar of the courtroom-as-theater, with credits that include Star Trek and Gimme Shelter;

Or Belli, the maker of new law, a Darrow of civil law who creatively brought demonstrative evidence to torts, who introduced the concepts of warranty and the adequate award and made ambulance chasing socially acceptable;

Or Belli the lawyer with an instinctive allegiance to the underdog, whose sense of justice and compassion led him to "torts"? literally, "wrongs,"--that had to be righted, to individuals who had to be helped against insurance companies and pharmaceutical conglomerates?

Belli is old now; his hands and face are covered with age spots. But he continues to be King of Torts. We met at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York for breakfast. Belli was typically attired in a Savile Row suit and accompanied by a stunning platinum blonde. The following is our conversation:

What are today's trial and torts trends?

It's become a much more businesslike thing...We don't waste as much time getting to the issues. We have pre-trial, where we cut the issues down...so when you're ready to go to trial, you know everything they've got, and they know everything you've got, and you go right to work and you don't waste a lot of time sparring. Then you have pre-trial settlement conferences, which settle a lot of cases. If you didn't have those, your calendars would get completely out of line...

Do you think we're finally seeing adequate awards in personal injury cases?

Yeah...there's still a discrepancy, in some cases in the same city, and there's still a terrible discrepancy between cities. Like, for example, in California, the verdicts in the far south and the far north are atrocious. They can't compare to San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Diego in the far south and Eureka in the far north, your verdicts are a third of what you'd get in Los Angeles. It's just the people haven't been educated--they're stingy. There's been no good trial lawyer who has raised the awards...I think you see some cities with pockets of high awards and they are attributable to one or two damn good trial lawyers, and that's unfortunate.

What do you think of the Burger Court?

The Burger Court is horrible...The one conservative you're going to have there for a long time is Rehnquist, who's a horrible conservative, and a dangerous conservative because he's sharp...Burger and Blackmun just don't have an appreciation of what the law's all about...They weren't brought up in the law. It's shocking to have a guy like Burger as Chief Justice, wanting to do away with jury trials and a lot of other things that he just doesn't understand.

What about Burger's disparagement of the American trial lawyer?