Fordham Law Professor Howard Erichson spoke with Bloomberg Law about Chevron’s recent victory in a long-running court battle over toxic waste spilled in the Amazon Rain Forest of Ecuador.
In 2011, an Ecuadorian court ruled that Chevron was responsible for the oil pollution; however, Chevron refused to pay the $8.6 billion judgment and took the case back to New York.
On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York ruled that the judgment won by lawyer Steven Donziger was obtained by means of bribery, coercion, and fraud. Monday’s decision is thought to be unprecedented in American law, as this case is the first in which a U.S. court allowed someone who lost a case in another country to come to the U.S. to attack a foreign court’s damages award.
Erichson, along with Paul Barrett, a Bloomberg Businessweek editor and author of Law of the Jungle, spoke about Monday’s ruling with Bloomberg Law host June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio’s “Bloomberg Law.”
“I certainly don’t know of another case like this one, but there are so many things about this case that seem unprecedented. The basic idea is well established that courts don’t want to enforce a judgment, if the judgment was obtained by fraud or corruption or bribery.
“It’s a big deal to take a multi-billion dollar judgment entered by a foreign court and then declare that the U.S. courts are unwilling to enforce that judgment.”
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“The second circuit—U.S. court of appeals—really deferred to Judge [Lewis] Kaplan, the trial judge’s factual findings and that’s what appellate courts are supposed to do. They did not hear the evidence, they deferred to the trial judge on those factual findings and then they applied the law.”