I have just published an article in the Utah Law Review that I wanted to flag for our readers. The focus is on the WTO security exception, one of the least appreciated aspects of WTO law. Given that the security exception is self-judging, it is curious that Member States rarely abuse the privilege by invoking it in bad...
The shoe has finally dropped. Ever since the Invictus Memo was released to the public we knew that the Ecuadorian Plaintiffs were considering twenty-seven different countries to enforce the $18.2 Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron. With Chevron's far-flung assets, it was plausible that the Plaintiffs would choose to enforce the judgment in countries with close ties to Ecuador and...
The Nuremberg defense pops up in the strangest places. As the NFL fans among our readers know, Commissioner Roger Goodell has suspended four New Orleans Saints players for their role in Bountygate -- a program whereby Saints players would get financial bonuses for intentionally injuring other players on the football field, essentially the most heinous crime a football player can...
The blog, which has been uniformly excellent to date, is dedicated to exploring maritime piracy in all its dimensions. Here is the description: Piracy is on the rise because of failed states and crushing poverty. A majority of modern pirate attacks originate in the Horn of Africa in Somalia although there is now a growing problem in the Gulf of Guinea. This...
Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations has an interesting peek at the history of the formation of the World Bank and IMF in a New York Times op-ed. From their inceptions, the World Bank has traditionally had an American President and the IMF a European Managing Director. But why? I had learned in college that...
It's not every day that a law review article comes along that combines two of my interests: greenwashing, whereby large corporations pretend to care about the environment in order to distract people from the fact that they are busily destroying it, and Chevron. So I want to put in a hearty plug for Miriam Cherry and Judd Sneirson's "Chevron, Greenwashing,...
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...
