Overview

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 The Small Matter of Suing Chevron 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Suzana Sawyer
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Weight:   0.703kg
ISBN:  

9781478015338

ISBN 10:   1478015330
Pages:   416
Publication Date:   30 June 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

Time Line Acknowledgments Fraud Opening: Crude's Valence of Truths I. Dissociating Bonds Hearing 1. Chemical Agency: Of Hydrocarbons and Toxicity Inspection 2. Exposure's Orbitals: Of Epidemiology and Calculation Death II. Spectral Radicals Catch 3. Alchemical Deals: Of Contracts and Their Seepage Clandestine 4. Radical Inspections: Of Sensorium as Toxic Proposition Kuankuan III. Delocalized Stabilities CEO 5. Plurivalent Rendering: Of Prehension Becoming Precaution Never 6. Bonding Veredictum: Of Corporate Capacity and Technique Tethered Derision Metamorphic Reprise: Valence in the Mixt Amisacho Notes References Index

Reviews

Powerfully written, methodologically innovative, and intricately and deeply researched, The Small Matter of Suing Chevron is a rewarding provocation for all readers interested in the ways activism, law, and science contend over the injuries of toxic harm. -Carol J. Greenhouse, author of The Paradox of Relevance: Ethnography and Citizenship in the United States

Author Information

Suzana Sawyer is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, author of Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of The Politics of Resource Extraction: Indigenous Peoples, Multinational Corporations, and the State.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions