Lying in a hospital bed in 1983, her body nearly crushed by a truck that ran over her in a bicycle accident, Ellen Smith Pryor thought about only one thing -- full recovery.

"I was lucky, because I never had to think about who was at fault," Pryor says. "With family and financial resources to help me, all I had to do was concentrate on getting better."

During her long rehabilitation, which included placement of a steel rod in her back, the young attorney realized that for many other accident victims, "getting better" isn't so simple. Their recovery, which can be filled with pain, mental anguish, or loss, often is hampered by concerns about liability (who is at fault?), insurance coverage (who will pay and will it be enough?), or disability (what will I do for a living now?).

Today, a fully recovered Pryor conducts research on compensation issues as a professor in SMU's School of Law, focusing on the legal areas of torts, disability, insurance, and workers' compensation. "I'm interested in laws that touch people where they really live," Pryor says. "To write about real problems -- ensuring that the scholarly effort is there -- that motivates me."

Before joining SMU in 1988, Pryor had spent several years practicing law for a Dallas firm that allowed her the flexibility to do pro bono work with indigent clients. She counseled them on such issues as Social Security disability, federal civil service disability, federal and state workers' compensation, state and federal discrimination claims, as well as traditional tort cases.

Although Pryor found that her pro bono work did make a difference in her clients' lives, she believed that nontort programs such as Social Security disability and workers' compensation were not attracting the legal scholarship she thought they deserved. "Nontort programs affect more people than many other areas of the law, and yet there are few academic articles written on them," Pryor says. "My goal is to suggest how disabilities should be measured and compensated in nontort settings."

As a legal researcher, Pryor not only has addressed a variety of issues on compensation, but also has effected changes to the system. In one area, Pryor found significant flaws, including subjectivity and gender bias, in the impairment guidelines contained in the American Medical Association's (AMA) 1988 publication, Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment. In the Harvard Law Review of February 1990, she wrote a review that outlined how the AMA guidelines were being misused by Texas legislators seeking a "quick fix" solution for determining the amount of money awarded to workers' compensation and disability claims. "The guidelines were used to determine the compensation 'fate' of hundreds of people," she says.

The guidelines treated men and women differently, and, in Pryor's opinion, unequally. Examples of gender bias could be found in "Activities of Daily Living," which discusses compensation for impairments. For a woman, compensation was calculated upon the degree to which her impairment reduced her ability to scrub floors; whereas, a man was compensated according to how his impairment affected his ability to play golf.

After publication of Pryor's Harvard Law Review article, the AMA Guides were revised to eliminate passages of acute gender bias, and Texas passed legislation in 1993 stating that the AMA Guides cannot be used in a gender-biased fashion when determining workers' compensation entitlements.

Pryor also is one of the authors on the third edition of a legal casebook used by first-year law students, The Law of Torts, published in 1997 by West Publishing. Tort, from the Latin root word "twisted," is defined as "a wrongful act, injury or damage (not involving a breach of contract), for which a civil action can be brought."

"The purpose of the tort system," Pryor says, "is to provide a forum for people to resolve and get redress for injuries that are not criminal."

In her research, Pryor also investigates the connection between liability insurance and the tort system. The issue strikes near home because her husband is a mediator who resolves often-complex civil tort and insurance cases.

"Insurance has languished for some years as a subject of interest to legal scholars," Pryor says. "But recently a new wave of legal scholars has written seriously about it. Insurance is an enormously important social engine that affects the entire liability system. To determine how the presence of insurance affects that system, I'm asking: 'Does liability insurance have an influence on a tort lawsuit?' 'Does it affect the way lawyers plead their claims?' and 'Does it affect the way they settle?' "

Some lawsuits are "underlitigated" -- the plaintiff chooses to plead to a charge of negligence instead of intentional harm because most insurance liability policies do not cover harm caused intentionally by the insured. Pryor cites a case in which a man is indicted for the murders of his wife and son, but while he is awaiting trial, a personal representative of the deceased sues him on a theory of negligence in causing their deaths. "A victim of an intentional harm will not pursue intentional tort because there is less money to gain," she says. "I look at why the problem exists and what can we do about it. There is always an incentive to structure lawsuits around insurance."

How the presence of insurance affects whether a case goes to trial or settles is the subject of another article that Pryor is writing with Vanderbilt University School of Law Dean Kent Syverud. Pryor has published several articles and has participated in a symposium on the issue of insurance companies and "bad faith" claims.

In addition, Pryor is evaluating the professional responsibility of lawyers hired by insurance companies to defend their insureds. "Often the situation creates various conflicts of interest," she says. Pryor cites as an example a man with auto insurance who is sued after an accident. He wants to fight the suit in court, but the insurance company wants to settle. A lawyer who is paid by the insurance company faces the dilemma of whether to look out for the interests of the defendant or the interests of the insurance company, which is paying him his legal fees. Pryor and University of Texas Law Professor Charles Silver have received a grant to write a series of articles explaining this long-standing problem.

In other research, Pryor has critiqued and rejected a tort reform theory known as the insurance theory of compensation. "A system of compensation should do whatever is necessary to bring about rehabilitation and allow injured parties to still be productive people," she says. "We hear in the media only about the offensive tort claims, like the woman awarded an astronomical sum after she sued a large restaurant chain because coffee spilled on her. But in reality, many times in accident claims the defendant is insolvent or can't be found. Some people get the compensation they need, but most don't get anything."

Although Pryor is not on the bandwagon with traditional tort reformers who seek to set limits of liability, she is devising a different type of tort reform. "Putting a cap on pain and suffering is the wrong type of fix," she says. "A better tort reform would be a no-fault system in which a defendant could make an immediate offer to pay. That way, the injured party gets immediate help, and the family has a way to get by with schedules for payments."

For example, she suggests that more laws be modeled after the childhood vaccine compensation laws. These laws provide that if a child contracts a disease, such as polio, after receiving the vaccine, the pharmaceutical company should be able to pay a selective no-fault liability and make an early offer to pay the family for medical expenses as they arise, rather than face a costly lawsuit.

Even before her accident, Pryor showed an interested in compensation issues. As a student at the University of Texas School of Law, she earned the highest grades in torts, contracts, property, civil procedure, and First Amendment. A member of academic honor societies, she received the Outstanding First-Year Student Award and was named Senior Student Most Likely To Contribute to Legal Scholarship. In addition, Pryor served as editor in chief of Texas Law Review and earned an award for the outstanding student law review publication. The experience exposed her to research conducted by some of the nation's brightest legal minds.

Before graduating, Pryor worked as an associate with the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling in summer 1980. She also served as a clerk for a federal appeals judge, drafting opinions for high-profile cases such as the Watergate/Nixon litigation.

But instead of associating with a prominent Washington law firm, Pryor returned to her hometown of Dallas after earning her J.D. in 1982. After she joined the firm in Dallas, her record for public service became so impressive that Pryor received the Dallas Bar Association's Pro Bono Award of the Year in 1985 and the State Bar of Texas' Frank Scurlock Award for outstanding pro bono service.

"I wanted to be an individual counselor for a person with a problem, not one of a team of 30," Pryor says. "I wanted to matter."

Accident victims who have benefited from Pryor's legal scholarship on compensation issues might agree that she has mattered indeed.