Katie’s intuition told her that this could be huge. She couldn’t wait to get started, so she seized the opportunity to write a paper for a law school class, which proposed using the Act to sue Unocal for the human rights abuses connected to the pipeline. Although Katie received an “A” on the paper, her professor dismissed her proposal as totally unrealistic. Moreover, he believed that international human rights issues had no place in U.S. courts. Katie was not deterred by this negative feedback. She could see possibilities and had the drive to act on them.
The day after her bar exam, Katie packed her bags and left for Thailand. She received seed money from Echoing Green to launch EarthRights International (ERI) with Tyler and Ka Hsaw. ERI began its work with offices in Thailand and Washington, D.C., as a nonprofit organization that works at the intersection of human rights and the environment—which it defines as “earth rights”—by documenting abuses, mounting legal actions against the perpetrators of earth rights abuses, providing training for grassroots and community leaders, and launching advocacy campaigns.
ERI brought the case of John Doe I, et al. v. Unocal Corp., et al, to both state and federal courts in California. Most legal experts said flat out that the case would never fly. And at first, they were right. But seeing possibilities where the experts could not, Katie persevered throughout the protracted, ten-year-long legal battle. ERI had their case dismissed in 2000, fought back and won by appeal, the right to continue. Katie also found that her old classroom debate was now repeating itself, but in the world of realpolitik—her professor from law school had become assistant attorney general and a poster-child scholar for the opposing side.
As the years passed, the case gained traction. Katie trudged forward, putting in countless hours of legal work, fundraising and research, and building coalitions with likeminded organizations such as Center for Constitutional Rights. After several years of fighting an uphill battle without losing hope, the rewards finally came, in 2005. Unocal agreed to settle the lawsuit. It was the first time in history that a major multinational corporation had settled a case of this type for monetary damages.
In the landmark settlement, the company agreed to compensate the Burmese villagers who sued the firm for complicity in forced labor, rape, and murder. By combining human rights law and environmental law, ERI had come up with a new and untested strategy that succeeded where older solutions had failed.
Equally importantly, the Unocal case set a strong legal precedent. As a result of ERI’s efforts, a series of rulings in the California federal court established that a corporation can indeed be held liable in U.S. courts for encouraging human rights violations by a foreign government. This put corporations on notice and forced them to consider their actions abroad. Today ERI uses the Unocal case as a model to fight corporate misbehavior. Working in partnership with other legal organizations and private lawyers, ERI seeks to remedy abuses of earth rights—all over the world. For instance, it is currently working with the victims of human rights abuses associated with the activities of the oil company Chevron in Nigeria to fight the case against Chevron in federal court in San Francisco.
ERI continues to Be Bold. It operates three schools for activists in Amazon, Burma, and the MeKong region. ERI has also started a grassroots education and outreach campaign in the United States to teach the American public about the law’s power in protecting ordinary citizens.
Playing “David” to the “Goliath” abuses that plague the earth is Katie’s mission. Today, she can’t imagine a life more meaningful.
