• The True Story of Chevron’s Ecuador Disaster, at http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/2012/0208-the-true-story-of-chevrons-ecuador-disaster.html

• Drawing the Line Against Chevron’s Misconduct, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDbSX4Vldsc

Another good investigation piece that explores Chevron’s conduct in Ecuador was produced by Australia’s Sunday Night program and is available at http://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-night/video/watch/26872380/.

As in his other attacks, Cassel recites from Chevron’s deeply corrupt and dishonest defense playbook, a compilation of outright falsehoods, distortions, out-of-context quotations, speculation, innuendo, and pseudo-science. This was crafted by a team of hundreds of lawyers and PR consultants and is cynically designed to meet requirements to raise defenses in enforcement jurisdictions, where Chevron hopes to prolong the litigation into its third decade, praying that the plaintiffs simply run out of steam. It’s a terrible strategy, not only because the plaintiffs are nowhere near running out of steam, but because Chevron will eventually have to move beyond the realm of fantasy and speculation and actually prove its charges under an established proof process. It can expect to face the same reaction it received from the the Ecuadorian court of appeals, the one court that thus far has had the opportunity to reach a final determination on Chevron allegations, which rejected them in their entirety after concluding that they “go nowhere without a good dose of imagination.”

‘In my view the Uniform Acts have the better of the argument. Even where a foreign judicial system is adequate in general, if a particular foreign judgment is nonetheless obtained by fraud and is not remedied by foreign courts, US courts should not be compelled to enforce a fraud. Our judges preside over courts of justice, not courts of “gotcha.”’

I think you’re talking about a case where the particular proceedings were flawed (either a party committed a fraud on the trial court or the trial court itself was somehow corrupt). But by hypothesis you say the foreign judiciary is “adequate in general.” In such a case, why should we not count on the foreign judiciary to catch and correct the fraud, through its appellate process, through the local equivalent of a Rule 60(b) motion, etc.? The only answer, I think, is that we are not confident in the foreign judiciary, which is just another way of saying it is not “adequate in general.”