Disabling Corporate Sovereignty in a Transnational Lawsuit

This article examines the opening proceedings of a lawsuit against Chevron‐Texaco filed on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorians for industrial contamination in the country's Amazonian region. It asks what are the legal and ethical regimes at play in defining (and denying) corporate sovereignty and impunity, corporate entanglements and accountabilities. Sawyer argues that while the notion of the corporation as a sovereign embodied entity ("natural person") serves ChevronTexaco management and legal counsel in sidestepping culpability for environmental degradation in Ecuador, the same notion of embodied corporate sovereignty situated in another discursive imaginary serves as foundational to the plaintiffs and their demands for exacting accountability.