With all of the attention we are devoting on Opinio Juris to Chevron's "rainforest Chernobyl" in Ecuador, it's important not to forget that Chevron's human and environmental destruction extends far beyond Ecuador's borders. Here are few of its other activities over the past month or so: 1. Five Chevron executives have been forbidden to leave Indonesia because of a remediation project...
I am not going to respond in depth to Professor Cassel's recent post on Chevron's responsibility for the "rainforest Chernobyl" caused by its predecessor's dumping of million gallons of crude oil and billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian rainforest. The plaintiffs' attorneys have prepared a lengthy and thoroughly footnoted reply to his open letter; interested readers can find...
I returned ten days ago from a week of teaching international humanitarian law in Jericho. It was my first time in the West Bank, and I won't soon forget it. I was particularly struck, not surprisingly, by the limitations on Palestinian life and movement -- the endless checkpoints, the hideous wall, the massive illegal settlements dotting the landscape....
Kudos to Daniel Chow and Mike Koehler for a wonderful conference last week at Ohio State Law School addressing the FCPA at thirty-five. It’s always a risk to hold a conference that mingles hard-core practitioners with soft and fuzzy academics, but this one seemed to work. The defense and prosecution side of the FCPA bar battled it out...
In his recent guest post, Doug Cassel attempts to portray Chevron as the innocent victim of illegal and unethical conduct by the lawyers for the plaintiffs harmed by its predecessor's dumping of 16.8 million gallons of crude oil and 20 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian rainforest. Cassel writes as an advocate for Chevron, so he can hardly...
Americans are furious. Officials are out of touch with the rest of us. If we thought about it, we should be angry that officials do not take international law more seriously. That is just another way that the people we send to Washington do not understand what we really need. American workers whose retirement funds hold GM stock should want to...
The ABA Journal has a cover story about the threat posed to island states by climate change. This is a topic we have discussed on Opinio Juris at various times. Duncan wrote at length about the Maldives; I had a shorter piece here, and there are various references in the midst of other blog posts. The Journal article is long and...
All is proceeding as my colleague Anna Gelpern has foreseen. Indeed. Years ago, she mentioned to me in passing that the markets seemed remarkably unaware, or anyway remarkably sanguine, about the question of whether local law (e.g., Greek law) or foreign law (e.g., English law) governed as the choice-of-law clause for the vast tonnage of European sovereign debt. Today, we find...
I don't see how this is going to go as planned: More than 160 German financial services executives are willing to come to Greece in order to strengthen the Greek tax mechanism, according to a report to be published in the German magazine 'Wirtschafts Woche' ...
Reuters reports that Denmark-based Lego will soon be powered solely by the wind: The family firm that controls Denmark's Lego is buying almost a third of a German offshore wind power project in an unusual foray outside the toy business to showcase its green credentials to customers. Lego's parent company, Kirkbi A/S, will invest 3 billion crowns ($534...
The Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street" column yesterday made an interesting comparison between sovereign bonds and corporate bonds. It pointed out that although in ordinary times, developed country sovereign debt is typically considered safer than corporate bonds of the same jurisdiction - the risk free rate of return, and the sovereign power to be able to tax, etc....
The New York Times Magazine has a story that is oddly depressing, on the one hand, and counter-intuitively optimistic, on the other - a report by Russell Shorto called simply, The Way Greeks Live Now (February 13, 2012). At the macro-level, things look unremittingly bleak; even if the latest deal reached last night holds, I don't think anyone believes it...
