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.

Time Line
Acknowledgments
Fraud
Opening: Crude's Valence of Truths
I. Dissociating Bonds
Hearing
1. Chemical Agency: Of Hydrocarbons and Toxicity
Inspection
2. Exposure's Orbitals: Of Epidemiology and Calculation
Death
II. Spectral Radicals
Catch
3. Alchemical Deals: Of Contracts and Their Seepage
Clandestine
4. Radical Inspections: Of Sensorium as Toxic Proposition
Kuankuan
III. Delocalized Stabilities
CEO
5. Plurivalent Rendering: Of Prehension Becoming Precaution
Never
6. Bonding Veredictum: Of Corporate Capacity and Technique
Tethered
Derision
Metamorphic Reprise: Valence in the Mixt
Amisacho
Notes
References
Index

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.