The Great Hartford Circus Fire: Creative Settlement of Mass Disasters

Yale University Press, 1991.  A history of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus fire on July 6, 1944, which killed 169 people, and its creative legal aftermath, a mass settlement of hundreds of liability suits.  The book describes how, with little guidance from existing case law and many quarrels and uncertainties, three enterprising lawyers secured a court-supervised receivership that kept the circus in business, enabling it to generate profits that could pay off the claims brought against it.