Thanks Doug! I hope my comment wasn’t unfair. Here is the sentence from your post that I had in mind: “I know of no one at the time who foresaw or predicted anything like the collapse of Ecuadorian judicial independence that began in 2004 and continues to the present.” But I take your point about your view that the courts were bad before, just not so bad that their judgments should categorically not be recognized. I think it’s fair to say that wasn’t Chevron’s position at the FNC stage, though.

I do not believe I dated 2004 as the year the Ecuadorian judiciary turned bad. It was never very good. But as you know, the standards of adequacy of a foreign judiciary, for purposes of a forum non conveniens transfer, were never very high. What happened in 2004 was not that Ecuador’s judiciary turned bad, but rather that it became a disaster — which it remains to this day — doug