ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"A monumental book. . . . An innovative study at the interface of law, health, and the environment, The Small Matter of Suing Chevron will appeal to anthropologists of all stripes, as well as legal scholars, epidemiologists, and those working in the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and Latin American contexts. As global toxics threaten to resign us all to irredeemable loss, Sawyer’s masterful ethnography demonstrates how it is still both possible and necessary to take a stand against corporate power and judicial imperialism."

-- Lindsay Ofrias NACLA

"This book is a valuable addition to work at the critical intersection of law and environmental studies, and essential reading for scholars concerned with energy politics in Latin America. It is best suited for upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate seminars."

-- Stuart Kirsch American Ethnologist

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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