The Global Lawyer: Will Chevron Lose in the Second Circuit?
Monday was not the first time that Chevron Corp. went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to evade a $9.5 billion Ecuadorean judgment over its legacy oil operations in the Amazon. And it wasn't the first time that, from Chevron's perspective, the show veered horribly off script…But the outcome of this oral argument is far less clear. That will not deter The Global Lawyer from reading the tea leaves…Second Circuit Judge Richard Wesley, who dominated the bench on Monday to such a degree that he seems likely to write the opinion, telegraphed a way around most of the anti-Chevron arguments…The more consequential drama came after Wesley pressed Olson on why Chevron didn't exhaust its local remedies by invoking Ecuador's Collusion Protection Act. Here's where the argument went off the rails.