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...