Lawyer and Client in Jarndyce v. Jarndyce
It’s true that the case has dragged on for many years, but given the amount of the Ecuadoran judgment, it’s impossible (I hope) that the case can end as Jarndyce ended, with all the money at stake eaten up by lawyers’ fees. Also, the Court of Chancery may have been slothful, wasteful, and out-of-touch, but its proceedings had a certain charm that I say is lacking in Judge Kaplan’s court, with all due respect to the judge. So I vote for death-cage match.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
Tagged: Ecuador, Lago Agrio
Please see my comment below on Mr. Ku’s blog. Also, legal commentary on the case has become more and more about seemingly clever analogies and strategies and who is winning and losing. It’s clear the Ecuadorians are the losers even if they realize every cent of the $18 billion. The rainforest, thanks to Chevron, will never be the same, nor will the culture of the five indigenous groups impacted. But, hey, it’s just poor people in the jungle. Now back to Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.
Karen, thanks for commenting. The strategy of your comment is to argue that Julian Ku and other bloggers don’t know what they’re talking about because they “haven’t spoken to the attorneys or the people there and haven’t seen the contamination for [themselves],” and that all one needs to do is read the documents you’ve cited to see the rights and wrongs of the case. Now, I haven’t read all of the documents cited in the footnotes to see whether they support the propositions for which you cite them. But I took a look at one that was of particular interest, just to see: the Staats report that is the basis for the claims about the independence of the Ecuadoran judiciary. You cite the report for the following proposition: “Even the U.S. State Department, in its an annual human rights reports, agrees that Ecuador’s courts are independent—a conclusion justified by almost every metric used to measure the independence of a country’s judiciary available to academics who genuinely study the issue.” As I noted in my post on the Cassel affair, the Staats report is hardly clearcut. What does Professor Staats actually say? He looks at the so-called CIRI dataset, which claims to measure the independence of judiciaries around the world. On a scale from 0 (not independent) to 2 (generally independent), Ecuador scored a 1 (partially independent) each year from 2004 to 2009, except for 2006, when it scored a 0. This may compare favorably with other Latin American judiciaries, but it is hardly a ringing endorsement. So the bottom line, which is not apparent from your report, is that there is a case to be made that there are systematic issues with the Ecuadoran judiciary. Now, that doesn’t mean that you lose that issue. Maybe a finder of fact will ultimately conclude that there were no systematic problems with the judiciary sufficient to call the Ecuadoran judgment into question. Or maybe it doesn’t matter whether there were systematic problems with the judiciary, because Chevron is estopped. But the bottom line is that there is a real dispute to be litigated, which isn’t apparent from the black-and-white tone of your comment.