Andy, thanks for commenting. I don’t claim to know what a US court will do with the estoppel argument, and it’s good to hear different views.

I have two responses to your comment. First, I don’t see why the fact that Texaco did not know that the Ecuadoran proceedings would turn out to be corrupt matters. In a judicial estoppel case, it’s not the truth of the representations to the court that matters, it seems to me. Second, you write: “We can’t have a system where a motion on forum non conveniens grounds gives the plaintiffs open season to undermine the new court.” Why is this more compelling than the point that we shouldn’t have a system where a party can avoid the jurisdiction of the US courts by pointing to the high quality of the relevant foreign courts and then avoid the judgment of the foreign court by pointing to the low quality of the same court it previously touted?

I should say that there are good arguments against estoppel here. One is that Texaco’s stipulation in the New York proceeding expressly reserved the right to challenge the Ecuadoran judgment on the grounds permitted by the Uniform Foreign Money Judgment Recognition Act. Another is that even if there is an estoppel, Chevron should be estopped only to assert that the Ecuadoran judiciary overall is corrupt, and not that there was corruption in the particular proceeding. A third is that there was a real change in the Ecuadoran judiciary between the time Chevron made its representations to the US court and the time the case was decided in Ecuador (although I think there is a counter-argument to this, namely that Chevron more or less assumed the risk).