The Small Matter of Suing Chevron

Front matter

R

FS Fl i ee

YUHAMVS VNVZNS

CHAPTER SIX 259 Bonding Veredictum Of Corporate Capacity and Technique TETHERED 296 DERISION 302

METAMORPHIC REPRISE 304 Valence in the Mixt

Notes 333 References 365 Index 389

1993 — The Lago Agrio plaintiffs sue Texaco Inc. in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. (November)

2001 — The US District Court for the Southern District of New York directs the lawsuit to be heard in Ecuador. (May)

2003 — The Lago Agrio plaintiffs sue Chevron in

the Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbíos. (May)

2001 — The Texaco and Chevron merger is finalized. (October)

2003 — The Ecuadorian litigation of the Lago Agrio plaintiffs’ legal claim begins. (October)

2011 — Chevron countersues the Lago Agrio plaintiffs in the US District Court for the

Southern District of New York. (February)

TIME LINE

2016 — The US Court of

2009 — Chevron sues the Republic of Ecuador in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. (September)

2011 — The Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbios finds Chevron liable for $9.5 billion

Appeals, Second Circuit, upholds the US District Court’s 2014 ruling delegitimizing the Ecuador ruling. (August)

2013 — The trial of Chevron’s countersuit commences in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. (October)

2014 — The US District Court for the Southern District of New York finds the 2011 Ecuador judgment was procured through fraud. (March)

2018 — The tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in contamination cleanup costs. (February)

rules in favor of Chevron’s bilateral investment treaty claim. (August)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Researching and writing this book has been a passage, diverging and morphing over more than a decade. Along the way, many have generously helped shape this book—bringing their unique knowing to events surrounding this legal saga. Their stories, experiences, insights, and reflection sustained me during long episodes of excavating legal and technical archives in solitude.

My deepest gratitude goes to all those in Ecuador working on these court cases. The poise, acumen, and humor of the Ecuadorian legal team and the plaintiffs in this legal saga never cease to amaze. I am especially indebted to Pablo Fajardo, Julio Prieto, and Donald Moncayo. Each graciously indulged me over the years by spending hours discussing legal nuances, addressing my technical questions, and steering me through court documents and rainforest oil ruin. Emergildo Criollo, Mariana Jimenez, Toribio Piaguaje, William Lucitante, and Alex Lucitante generously shared their lived experiences, unease, and convictions in the face of excruciating odds. Over the decades, in various collectivities, these individuals have established two courageous organizations—the Union de Afectados por Texaco and the Alianza Ceibo— that support environmental justice initiatives in the Ecuadorian Amazon. All proceeds from this book are directed to support them.

I am similarly indebted to the US side of the Ecuadorian plaintiffs’ legal team. Conversations at different points with Cristobal Bonifaz over the decades-long trajectory of this legal saga have made me all the wiser. I am especially grateful to the generosity of Steven Donziger and Aaron Marr Page. Both were unfailingly available to engage with my questions and to help track down obscure legal documents. The target of Chevron’s unrelenting legal harassment, Steven has always shared with bigheartedness and humanity. It is my hope that this book (along with collaborative work with Lindsay Ofrias) reveals the corporation’s legal campaign against Steven to be the unwarranted distraction it is and redirects scrutiny to Chevron.

A collective of Indigenous rights and environmental advocates, many with long-standing deep roots in the Ecuadorian Amazon, has been an unswerving source of support and assistance. Paulina Garzon’s ethical clarity was an inspiration, beginning in 1993. The generosity and deeply committed work of Leila Salazar, Kevin Koenig, Paul Paz y Mino, and Atossa Soltani of Amazon Watch have provided a strong and sustained source of grounding since 2003. More recently, Mitch Anderson, Jenna Webb, Brian Parker, and Luke Weiss of Amazon Frontlines have opened ways of collaborative knowing for what might be. Last, the subtle practices of Lexie Groper of Amisacho Restauración engender healing worlds seen and unseen. The deep integrity and ethics that all of these individuals bring to their work in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon have been profoundly giving.

In the United States, I have been blessed by dear colleagues and friends. Marisol de la Cadena and Cristiana Giordano have been vast wells of warmth, inspiration, and provocation. Without their patient listening and challenging, this book would be otherwise. Kyu Hyun Kim, Alan Klima, Joe Dumit, Tim Choy, Tarek Elhaik, and Fatima Mojadedi have collectively and individually ever extended new ways of thinking and abiding. Similarly, a number of current and former graduate students have sustained me and my thought. I extend gratitude to Whitney Larratt-Smith, Kristi Onzik, Nathan Lane, Adam Kersch, Sofia Rivera, Jonathan Echeverri Zuluaga, Kristina Lyons, Jake Culbertson, Mariel Garcia Llorens, Duskin Drum, Stefanie Graeter, and Fabiana Li. I am especially indebted to Nathan Lane, whose attention to precision of thought helped bring this manuscript to production.

Maria Antonieta Guzman-Gallegos needs a special thank you. Since my first fieldwork incursions in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1992, Maria’s grounded wisdom and insights of this region and beyond have been profoundly generative. Bill Durham also holds a special place. Bill’s ongoing unwavering support since my decades-ago graduate years has been a rare, treasured gift. Other colleagues have also unsparingly supported this project, generating ideas to further nuance how to think about the controversies at the core of this book. Among them, I thank Andrew Barry, Doug Rogers, Paul Sabin, Sara Wylie, Matt Huber, Hannah Appel, Michael Watts, Arthur Mason, Andrea Ballestero, Dominic Boyer, John Sammito, Donna Goldstein, Lindsay Ofrias, Carol Greenhouse, Nancy Postero, John Andrew McNeish, Michael

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ziser, and Phil Kass for their generosity. Each has, in their own way, pushed me to hone my analytics and attend to more.

The embrace of deep sustaining friendships has been a continual source of replenishment: Marcus Grant (who passed too early from this life), Karina Morris, Guillermo Prado, Michael Moore, Eric Black, and Frauke Sandig have been rocks of stability, joy, and wonder. Jennifer Welwood has extended an embodied knowing that ever brings gifts. She and my sanghita sisters— Alejandra, Alexis, Annice, Amber, Amies, Charmaine, Karen, Janice, and Shanti—are tender community. Amrit Rai similarly has spun spirit.

Loving gratitude goes to my family near and far. Dorothy, Allan, John, Margaret, Leslie, Eric, Nancy, and Kirke have been breaths of love and laughter always. Helen, Mary, Anthony, Kate, Stefan, Florence, Lou, Jane, Steve, and Carolyn have recurrently extended delight and warmth. Josie and Kasya have made their zest for life infectious. Duncan has given in his own inimitable way in love and care. Zoé has embodied the density and vastness of love. I dedicate The Small Matter of Suing Chevron to her.

This book project has been generously supported by a fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies, the University of California President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities, and the UC Davis Humanities Institute. Anitra Grisales was the first to read my manuscriptin-progress in its entirety and gave me the courage to push further. Lisl Hampton and Alejandra Mejia at Duke University Press meticulously attended to details to work their production magic. I am ever grateful for the fiercely gentle support of Gisela Fosado, editorial director at Duke University Press. Gisela’s profound mind makes a difference that matters.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XV

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There is a video on the Chevron Corporation’s website titled “The ‘Legal Fraud of the Century’ in 3 Minutes.” It opens with an image of Steven Donziger, a longtime US advisory lawyer for Ecuadorian plaintiffs who, at the turn of the twenty-first century, had sued Chevron for contamination.’ Seated with him are scientists who served as experts during the 2003-11 litigation against Chevron in Ecuador (figure 1).

Against gripping music, Steven’s words sound: “Facts do not exist. Facts are created.” One expert laughs. Across the screen in red letters emerges the word FRAUD. Next, BRIBERY is stamped on three still images—that of a scien-

T FUN Old

€ TAAĐIA tific expert and of two former judges who had presided over the lawsuit. The photograph in the center is of Nicolás Zambrano, the Ecuadorian judge who found Chevron liable for $9 billion in February 2011 (figure 2).

Skillfully produced, over the next few minutes the video splices together a compelling cascade of “wrongdoing” in the Ecuadorian legal proceedings against Chevron. “Defending itself against false allegations” that the corporation was “responsible for alleged environmental and social harms in the Amazon region of Ecuador,’ Chevron countersued in the United States.” In 2014, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York “found [that] Donziger violated racketeering laws committing mail and wire fraud, money laundering, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice [in suing the corporation]. . . . Steven Donziger thought he was going to get rich by suing a big oil company” (figure 3). With a tinge of bravado, the final sentence ere

FRAUD

-0S TRYC TION OF JUSTICE — affirms: “But in the end, the US court’s decision helped expose the fraud, the bribery, and most importantly, the truth?

In 2016, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld that “truth,” and in 2018, under separate legal proceedings, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague did the same. Both judicial assemblies enacted a spectacular metamorphosis. The US court transformed a contamination lawsuit into a racketeering scheme, displacing attention onto a sole US lawyer. The Permanent Court of Arbitration transformed a contamination lawsuit into the breaching of a bilateral investment treaty and thus displaced liability onto the Republic of Ecuador. Codified in law, Chevron’s fraud-of-thecentury truth delegitimized a seven-plus-year litigation in Ecuador and a sovereign nation’s judiciary. It made clear that neither should be taken seriously. The Small Matter of Suing Chevron intervenes to do precisely that.

FRAUD

Opening Crude’s Valence of Truths

Coalescence | RENDERING TRUTHS

In 2004, the lawyers representing Ecuadorian campesinos (small farmers) and indigenas (Indigenous people) and the lawyers representing the Chevron Corporation followed the president of the Superior Court of Justice of Nueva Loja along a rivulet and down a precipice. Close behind were a court clerk, supporting counsel, technical experts, and local residents. The legal delegations stopped at the base of the ravine. Technical teams drove augers into and extracted samples from the swampy soils. And as the collective toured the site over the next day, lawyers expounded legal arguments on the presence or nonpresence of contamination, on the occurrence or nonoccurrence of cancer clusters, on the effectiveness or noneffectiveness of prior remediation, and on the existence or nonexistence of legal liability.

The legal entourage was in the midst of litigating a lawsuit against Chevron for Texaco’s allegedly shoddy oil operations. Filed on behalf of thirty thousand Ecuadorian peasants and indigenas, the lawsuit alleged that Texaco (which had merged with Chevron in 2001) had used substandard technology to explore for and exploit hydrocarbons in Ecuador, and that this technology, in turn, systematically polluted the environment and endangered the health of local people. This was the first of over one hundred slated judicial inspections of former Texaco oil installations from which contamination allegedly seeped as a result of the company’s operations between 1964 and 1990. In this, as with the other fifty-four judicial inspections that actually transpired during the litigation, legal teams disputed whether the crude oil visible in soils, embedded in sediments, and glistening on water was toxic. They disputed whether illness and poor health experienced by people living near oil facilities were the result of Texaco’s activities. They disputed whether a remediation project undertaken by Texaco nearly a decade earlier was a sham. And they disputed whether a layered corporate subsidiary structure and previous state-corporate contracts shielded Chevron from liability.

In February 201, after seven years of litigation, the president of the single-chamber court in Lago Agrio, a then rough and bustling Amazonian town, rendered a precedent-setting ruling. Judge Nicolas Zambrano found the Chevron Corporation responsible for polluting sizable tracts of the Ecuadorian Amazon and harming public health. He ordered that Chevron pay $8.646 billion in damages, monies to be used for “reparation measures”: a sum soon increased to $9.5 billion to compensate the legal team.’ Environmental justice movements around the world celebrated. The $9 billion fine made it the then largest ever to emerge from environmental litigation in history. And, for a while, the lawsuit was emblematic of the rapacious exploits of an arrogant oil company and the stalwart integrity of Indigenous, peasant, and green opposition.

On the eve of the 2011 Ecuadorian ruling, however, Chevron cried foul and filed a countersuit in a US district court. In March 2014, that court found that the Ecuadorian ruling had been procured through fraud, and the court placed an injunction on the ruling’s enforceability in the United States.” Two years later, in August 2016, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld that ruling. Concomitantly, in 2009, Chevron filed another legal claim with the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague against the Republic of Ecuador. In September 2018, the PCa’s tribunal rendered its decision; in line with the US court, the tribunal determined that the republic had violated both justice and the US-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty in upholding the Lago Agrio ruling. Irrespective of these actions by the US court and the investment tribunal, the 2011 Amazonian judgment against Chevron still stands—as it will into perpetuity.

Within the United States (and increasingly around the world), Chevron’s legal-fraud worlding has succeeded in making “corruption” the optic through which to view the Ecuadorian litigation and judiciary. This worlding transmogrified an environmental contamination claim into a fraud and racketeering scheme (in the US counterlitigation), and then transmogrified it again into an international judicial and treaty violation (in the European counterlitigation). This successful deployment of “corruption” has had two primary effects. First, by branding the Ecuadorian lawsuit as fraudulent, it instructs that the Amazonian litigation need not be taken seriously. Second, by displacing questions of corporate wrongdoing, the “corruption” verdicts obscure the Amazonian litigation’s far-reaching significance for transnational jurisprudence and environmental accountability. That the corruption optic seeks to foreclose further scrutiny is precisely why careful attention to how we reconcile challenging socioecological controversies—as well as make sense of formidable corporate adversaries—is called for. The Small Matter of Suing Chevron seeks to intervene toward that end.*

So how did it happen? How did an Ecuadorian judge assigned to a courthouse in a city that started as a “jungle oil-camp,” and still reeked, forgotten by twentieth-century petroempires, render a decision against Chevron, the second largest oil conglomerate in the United States and the fourth largest private petroleum company in the world? Rarely do complaints of contamination in marginalized places reach a court of law, let alone get litigated, much less prevail.* These litigations are not easy, often becoming spectacularly protracted. And how was it that after presiding over a seven-week bench trial, a US federal court judge delegitimized that decision three years later? A decision upheld on appeal by Ecuador’s provincial Appeal Division, National Court of Justice, and Constitutional Court. Indigenas, campesinos, their lawyers, and their experts never imagined that corporate retaliation would condemn them to the underworld of mob extortion. And how was it possible— even after a decade of arbitration generated tomes of evidence supporting the Ecuadorian judgment—that an international tribunal ruled in concert with the US court’s delegitimizing opinion and denounced the judgment internationally?

The Small Matter of Suing Chevron examines the processes that led to the precedent-setting Lago Agrio ruling and its tumultuous aftermath. Undoubtedly, the lawsuit in Ecuador—together with its New York pretrial hearings (from 1993 to 2002) and its countersuits in the same US federal court (from 201I to 2016) and the PCA (from 2009 to 2018)—bears witness to daunting (at times debilitating) corporate opposition. That Chevron has unleashed formidable legal defenses on both sides of the equator, as well as the Atlantic, is an understatement.

But the significance of the core litigation in Ecuador (2003-11) rests beyond the fact that, despite all, it found a multinational corporation guilty of negligence. The Ecuadorian litigation and the legal snarls that followed are momentous because they reflect how truths are legally scientifically made and also legally scientifically unmade. In Ecuador, the actual litigation from 2003 to 2011 intriguingly forged an inclusive, grounded, and experiential judicial assembly through which to address the scientific, technical, and legal controversies that too often mire contamination disputes. In the subsequent US forums, not only did the countersuit foreclose the possibility of such a judicial assembly, but also US legal procedures misattributed and demeaned the Ecuadorian judicial process and its radically different form. In good part, this was accomplished through Chevron’s prodigious and fierce legal countercampaign, launched in the United States precisely when its prospects in Ecuador were not looking great. Yet it was also enacted through courtroom protocol and procedures. Held privately behind closed doors, Chevron’s international arbitration further foreclosed possibilities of an inclusive judicial assembly. In late 2018, the PCa’s tribunal not only embraced the ruling on the US federal court, but also significantly extended that opinion.

The Small Matter of Suing Chevron suggests that there is much to learn from these legal processes about crude’s valence of truths—by which I mean the relational compositions through which truths are brought forth and consolidated. In the ruling of courts of law—in their juris dictio, that “language that speaks its performative authority into existence” and “simultaneously presupposes its power” (Richland 2013: 213)—legal truth is absolute in place and time. Upon considered deliberation, determining the finding of fact and application of legal principles, the language of law commands a singular legal truth.’ A litigation may be complicated. A judge’s decision may be complicated. But that judicial opinion is a coherent, rational, and inevitable legal truth based on the legal facts found and the legal principle applied. The verdict— the verus dictum (true saying)—is a “declaration or speaking of truth” (Constable 2010: 13).8 In the juris dictio of courts of law, legal truth—and the facts determined legally veridical as a function of procedure and doctrine—is “found,” not made. Through the work of “finding”—enabled by employing the “pragmatic warrants” substantiating legal authority—a court of law simultaneously settles which facts are “legally accepted” as true and renders the “authoritative account” to decisive effect (Mertz 2007: 67). This is the case, irrespective of the controversy surrounding a court’s findings of fact or its role in authorizing the distribution of risks and harms (Beck 1992; Proctor 1995). There is, of course, a tension here. As Elizabeth Mertz and other legal scholars note, jurisprudence broadly recognizes that its truths are found as such by virtue of particular processes and procedures. And yet, in rendering a ruling and decreeing sanctioned penalties, judicial opinion often registers a conviction that implicitly attributes (more or less brazenly) “legal truth” to be real—or, at least, “highly authoritative as to epistemological certainty” (Mertz 2007: 67). Because the law invokes justice as fundamental to its being, verus dictum is normatively attributed to be che truth. That is, once loosened from its formal authority and exhausted of all processes of appeals, judicial opinion routinely lands as consequential truth in the world.

Exploring the Ecuadorian lawsuit against Chevron, its US countersuit, and its international arbitration, and in concert with the work of critical legal scholars (Eades 2008; Jacquemet 2009; Jain 2006; Jasanoff 1995, 2012), The Small Matter of Suing Chevron interrupts the notion that juris dictio “finds” the truth. Rather, the journey through these litigations follows how truth is made and also made complex. The paradox is that while the law cannot allow for the complexity of truths made, it partakes in enacting truth precisely as such. The task I have set for myself is, on the one hand, to show the complexity of the relationally contingent, sociomaterial compositions that produced legal truths over the course of these litigations. And, on the other, to signal the fraught tenor of law’s complicity in the corporation’s claim to being a sovereign moral actor.

The book’s title, being plurivalent, seeks to signal this condition. For now, what’s salient is the work of irony. Suing Chevron was clearly no small matter; it was a monumental feat that, in turn, generated monumental counterfeats. More trenchantly, that polite, if vaguely cheeky, rectifying formulation— “there is the small matter . . ”—tenders the proposition that the truths in these lawsuits were densely embedded in processes far exceeding their singularity or fixity, far exceeding the form of their authoritative rendering. The “small matter” seeks to rouse curiosity and materialize the contradictions inherent in liberal legality—that the objects of law and the subjects of law, far from being independent, autonomous, pregiven entities found with inherent facticity or will, all issue forth in practice as compositions saturated in relational contingencies.

The Small Matter of Suing Chevron proposes that the 201 Ecuadorian judgment unfolded as it did in Ecuador not because, as Chevron claimed (and the US and international arbitration courts concurred), the Ecuadorian judiciary was corrupt. Nor did it find Chevron liable because, as the Lago Agrio plaintiffs (LAP) claimed, rightful science triumphed over evil, like David over Goliath. Rather, what I suggest was consequential in adjudicating this case were the procedures unique to Ecuador’s civil law tradition, whereby geochemical, physiological, contractual, statutory, and experiential “facts” were both produced and subsequently argued as “evidence” to prove and disprove environmental, health, and contractual liability. Without doubt, stark disparities marked the lawsuit. And, clearly, missteps occurred. However, engaging in an analysis attuned to the complexity of the lawsuit, however, reveals that neither disparities, nor improprieties, nor scientific truth determined the legal outcome in Ecuador. Rather, the limitations and indeterminacies of science, the compromised quality of corporate contractual arrangements, the expanded modes of legal recognition, and the sociomateriality of “facts” and their making enacted a legal reality in Ecuador that led to this unparalleled and fiercely contested ruling.

COMPLEXITY’S AFFORDANCES

The Small Matter of Suing Chevron suggests that much has been lost in the US federal court and the PCA ruling that the Ecuadorian litigation was a “legal absurdity” (Chevron’s phrase). Far from inconsequential, the nearly eightyear litigation against Chevron in Ecuador offers profound insights about truth and complexity. Countering Chevron’s successful (in the United States and the world of commercial arbitration) “corruption” narrative, this book explores how (despite its flaws) the Ecuadorian litigation might serve as an instructive sociolegal assemblage for reckoning seemingly intractable contamination disputes.

The chapters that follow indirectly repudiate Chevron’s successful legal counterclaim—and indeed the position of the US district court, the US court of appeals, and the PCA in The Hague—that portrayed the litigation in Ecuador as a sham and Ecuador’s judicial system as corrupt. The text traces in detail how Ecuadorian court procedures gave form to a complex reality and made its slipperiness stable enough for judicial reasoning to distribute responsibility under the law. The “facts” generated from the court’s unique judicial assembly of judicial inspections (fifty-four selected by the parties and nine by the court)—whether about hydrocarbon chemistry, disease etiology, business deals, laws of the Republic, local stories, or sensory perception—did not establish singular truths. Rather, the facts of chemistry hovered in the realm of the uncertain; those of disease in the realm of the indeterminant; those of contract in the realm of the dubious; those of law in the realm of the interpretive; those of testimony in the realm of the subjective; those of experience in the realm of the intuitive. They opened space for a reasoning that bowed toward precaution, among other things, to render a judicial decision.

IO

The US court abided in and generated its own complexity, swayed by an imperious judicial hubris, the strictures of legal technique, and the litigating prowess of corporate lawyers. For one, it could not recognize the Ecuadorian proceedings as juris dictio. This was one of the foundations from which the US court determined that Chevron’s accusations of subterfuge by LAP lawyers and Ecuadorian judges actually occurred.

Importantly, then, The Small Matter of Suing Chevron’s fundamental ethos is not to determine truths, or arbitrate truths, but to follow how truths were made. That is, the larger aim of this book is to understand the complexity by which the judicial rulings came to be made definitive. But what do I mean by complexity? A good jumping-off point might be a baseline understanding proposed by social theorists John Law and Annemarie Mol. Complexity exists, they suggest, when “things relate but don’t add up,” when “events occur but not within the processes of linear time,” or when phenomena appear to “share a space but cannot be mapped in terms of a single” grid of intelligibility (2002: 1).° These sorts of predicaments infused both the litigation against Chevron and the corporation’s countersuits. And this provokes reflection on the material, ethical, and legal conditions that juridical rulings and dispute parties sublimated in their determinations of truth. The Small Matter of Suing Chevron seeks to gather and recompose that which the law and those party to it often volatilized into the ether: the aberrant phenomena, the inconvenient practices, the dense repositories that made messy worlding processes.

So how were particular, highly contested legal truths derived? I explore this question by dissecting the competing facts that each side produced out of similar conditions. My analysis of the Ecuadorian litigation gives presence to a world in which absolutes rarely obtain, and yet decisions and actions are taken regardless. This is a world composed of complexity where, instead of certainty and fixity defining the ground from which to move, indeterminacy, unknowing, and ambiguity in part constitute the sphere of legal mastery. My analysis of Chevron’s countersuit gives presence to a world in which reductive interpretation and discerned dissembling in part constitute the sphere of legal mastery. My analysis of the PCA arbitration gives presence to a world in which ambivalent legal technicalities, soldered together with performed misinterpretation, constitute the sphere of legal mastery. The court of each jurisdiction necessitated a distinctive mode of judicial mastery—techniques for assembling a unique jurisprudential grid of intelligibility—to render its legal truth. There was nothing straightforward about this, however. All knowing comes through method.

Holding that in mind and reworking Marilyn Strathern’s words, it matters what method we use to think other methods with.’° While researching and writing The Small Matter of Suing Chevron, chemistry recurrently surfaced as a problematic. As will soon be clear, chemistry influenced my thinking and informed my analytical point of entry. Leaning on chemistry, a discipline manifestly aware since the eighteenth century that its knowledge was methodologically mediated, underscored all the more the salience of method in my own knowing. A long line of philosophers of science suggests that what is known is contingent on the technical, procedural, and methodological circumstances of knowledge-making practice (Bachelard 1953; Canguilhem 1991; Rheinberger 2010). A number of science studies scholars extend this insight to propose not only that scientific methods describe their object of study but also that variable techniques of inscription produce it (Coopmans et al. 2014; Dumit 2004; Latour 1988; Latour and Woolgar 1987; Mol 2002; Vertesi 2015). The gnawing question: how can we seriously consider the proposition that method in the social sciences similarly describes and partakes in constituting its object of study (Latour 2005; Law 2004)? Chemistry inspired a method of delving into this legal trilogy—a legal saga whose meaning has been densely congealed through legal texts and public commentary—in a way that sustained an element of indeterminacy, openness, and surprise. It gave me alternative ways of inquiring and intervening, and for reflecting on how method manifests its object.

To begin, insights from chemistry shifted my analytical register away from a passion to denounce, away from a focus on overt power, away from a preoccupation with savvy charismatic characters, and away from the urgency to give voice to the forgotten. Others, scholars and journalists, have produced significant and moving work in these areas. Beyond the plethora of news articles on these legal claims and litigations, extended pieces of investigative reporting have appeared in Vanity Fair (Langewiesche 2007), the New Yorker (Keefe 2012), Rolling Stone (Zaitchik 2014), and the Nation (North 2015, 2021), each variously following two LAP lawyers, Steven Donziger and Pablo Farjardo. Two books present Chevron’s case in a positive light (Barrett 2014; Goldhaber 2o14a). A growing collection of anthropologists has analyzed the effects of Texaco’s oil operations on Indigenous peoples (Cepek 2012, 2016, 2018; Kr@ijer 2017) and of the process of litigation on local populations, marginalization, and national identity (Fiske 2017, 2018; Ofrias 2017; Ofrias and Roecker 2019; Valdivia 2007). Law scholars have explored the cases’ legal challenges (a limited list includes Alford 2012; Gomez 2013, 2015; Guaman 2019; Khatam 2017; Kimerling 1991b, 2006, 2013a, 2013b; Mella 2017), including an elegant case-study analysis (Aman and Greenhouse 2017). And a few documentaries detail the lawsuit, Crude (Berlinger 2009) being the most significant, with another currently in the making.” Ultimately, the legal team for the LAP will chronicle the events they lived. As may Chevron representatives as well.

Similarly, given that high emotions commonly infused discussion of this legal saga, thinking in parallel with chemistry directed me away from anticipated territories. Extending insights from chemistry compelled me to explore the lawsuit and the countersuits, and the discrete controversies within each, in ways other than through a lens of winners and losers, right and wrong, good and evil, exploited and exploiter, honorable humility and insatiable greed, noble redemption and shameless transgression. These labels, of course, have their place. But they easily flip and work for either side in the lawsuit and the countersuits, depending on one’s moral persuasions and webbed positionality. Moving away from a good/evil analysis enabled me to think beyond the fact that what corporations do is simply lie. Not that they don’t; lying was a recurrent practice. But what makes the oil industry, and Chevron in this case, so powerful is not that they lie about and falsify the real. It is that they generate entire worlds and those worlds enfold and recompose a plethora of entities and beings in coalescing “truths.” Indulging in “the seductive clarity of denunciation” (Redfield 2005: 349) extends, for those of us in the petro-techno-zones of privilege, the illusion that we are not implicated in the very worlds the industry relationally elaborates. That is, it elides the dilemma that we are profoundly complicit in the very industry we condemn. The compulsion to denounce, rather than inspect, the relationships we sustain with and through crude oil is insufficient. Complicity invites discomfort and asks more of us—a tact, a discernment, a sensibility that eschews comforting binaries, hierarchies, and transcendence.