Last March, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan concluded his 500-page opinion on the Ecuadorean litigation fraud against Chevron Corp. with a lament. We will never know, he wrote, whether the Ecuadorean plaintiffs had a legitimate claim against Chevron for pollution of the Amazon. The whole legal world nodded in agreement with the exception of one person: Judge Richard Wesley of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On Monday, the plaintiffs and their U.S. lawyer in the Ecuador suit, Steven Donziger, asked the Second Circuit to overturn Kaplan's epic ruling, which labeled Donziger a fraud and enjoined the plaintiffs from collecting a $9.5 billion tort judgment handed down by an Ecuadorean court.