The Small Matter of Suing Chevron

In 2011 an Ecuadorian court issued the world's largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years a US federal court and an international tribunal determined that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and was unenforceable. In <i>The Small Matter of Suing Chevron</i> Suzana Sawyer delves into this legal trilogy to explore how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of with and through crude oil. In Sawyer's analysis chemistry proves crucial. Analytically it affords a grammar for appreciating how molecular technical and legal agencies catalyzed distinct jurisdictional renderings. Empirically the chemistry of hydrocarbons (its complexity unfathomability and misattribution) significantly shaped competing judicial determinations. Ultimately chemical scientific contractual and litigating techniques precipitated this legal saga's metamorphic transformation transmuting a contamination claim into an environmental liability then a racketeering scheme and then a breach of treaty. Holding the paradoxes of complicity in suspension Sawyer deftly demonstrates how crude matters technoscience and liberal legality configure how risk and reward deprivation and disavowal suffering and surfeit become legally and unevenly distributed.