The Enforcement Loophole: Judgment-Recognition Defenses as a Loophole to Corporate Accountability for Conduct Abroad

Authors

Christina Weston

Abstract

This Comment analyzes the 'enforcement loophole' that will enable Chevron to fight enforcement of the Lago Agrio court's judgment 'for decades into the future.' The enforcement loophole is the corporate defendant's practice of using the standard defenses to foreign country judgment recognition available in the United States for an unintended purpose: to circumvent accountability abroad. After obtaining an FNC dismissal to a foreign tribunal where the corporate defendant has no major assets, the corporate defendant then has the opportunity to tailor the foreign litigation so that it satisfies one of the exceptions to recognition in the United States. As a result, even though foreign-country judgments are generally recognized on nearly the same basis as sister-state judgments, the enforcement exceptions afford corporate defendants an opportunity to manipulate the foreign litigation so that the foreign-country judgment is unenforceable in the United States.

Recommended Citation

Christina Weston, The Enforcement Loophole: Judgment-Recognition Defenses as a Loophole to Corporate Accountability for Conduct Abroad, 25 Emory Int'l L. Rev. 731 (2011).
Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/eilr/vol25/iss1/16