Note: Today's post is co-authored with Lauren DeMartini, a student at NYU Law School, who attended arguments in San Francisco; thank you Lauren!

San Francisco, 14 June 2010 - On Monday, lawyers for a group of Nigerian environmental activists argued an appeal before the Ninth Circuit in Bowoto v. Chevron....

April 23, 2009, San Francisco, CA - Late Wednesday afternoon, a U.S. federal court denied Chevron's attempt to have Nigerian victims of abuses pay the oil giant's costs of litigation arising out of Bowoto v. Chevron, a landmark human rights lawsuit that went to trial last fall. Despite a...

Human rights lawsuits aim to hold multinational corporations liable for their role in South African apartheid

The human rights gods are smiling: As if yesterday's Fujimori verdict wasn't enough, a U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York has ruled that historic lawsuits against multinational corporations...

"I governed from hell, not from the palace."

With these fateful words, Alberto Fujimori closed his defense last Friday. After 491 days of trial - where a mountain of evidence tied Fujimori to a campaign of massacres, kidnapping and torture - the one-time Peruvian president claimed that he merely did...

On Monday February 23, 2009, U.S. authorities indicted General José Guillermo García -- a former defense minister for El Salvador -- on two felony counts of immigration fraud. At first glance, two measly immigration charges for a man who presided over years of horror and human rights abuse in the...

In week four of the trial, we saw Chevron make its case before a San Francisco jury. To my eyes, it was the legal equivalent of The Empire Strikes Back--the dark lords of the extractive industries pitting their limitless resources against a scrappy band of rebels.

We even had...

What happens when an oil company gets its back to the wall in a human rights lawsuit? Like a cornered hound, it goes on the attack. That's exactly what Chevron Corporation has done in the first three weeks of the Bowoto v. Chevron trial in San Francisco.

Accused of complicity...