SILLY OLD BEAR V. MOUSE.(The Talk of the Town)

It's not entirely clear how the Winnie the Pooh lawsuit became a modern epic. The facts of the case seem straightforward. In 1930, a literary agent named Stephen Slesinger acquired the merchandising rights to the Pooh story from A. A. Milne, who created the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood to entertain his real-life son, Christopher Robin Milne. In 1961, Shirley Slesinger, Stephen's widow, signed those rights over to the Walt Disney company in return for four per cent of the revenues that Disney received from Pooh merchandise. Thirty years later, the Slesinger family sued Disney for breach of contract, claiming that the company had stinted on the royalties. Now, twelve years into the litigation, the case is said to be the oldest one on file in Los Angeles Superior Court, and it has recently earned another dubious distinction, as a kind of postscript to the O. J. Simpson case.

Dozens of lawyers have worked on the Pooh case, but there are now two main antagonists. Three years ago, Disney hired Daniel M. Petrocelli, who is best known for having represented the family of Ronald Goldman in a wrongful-death civil lawsuit against Simpson. (The jury in that case found Simpson liable for the murder of the former Brentwood waiter, and ordered him to pay damages of $33.5 million, which he has not done.) A few weeks ago, Petrocelli got a new adversary, when the Slesinger family replaced its former counsel with Johnnie Cochran, who led Simpson's successful defense in the criminal case against him. "The question in this case," Cochran said the other day, "is 'Does the Mouse keep its word?' "

Obviously, there are many other questions, starting with how a breach-of-contract matter grew into a Beverly Hills "Bleak House." One unresolved issue is whether the contract covers home videos, which barely existed when it was signed. But most of the delays seem to be the result of lawyers fighting with ...