An epic legal battle going to trial in federal court in San Francisco this week will ask jurors to decide whether oil giant Chevron Corp. sanctioned human rights abuses that killed and wounded protesters at its Nigerian facilities, or was simply protecting its employees from belligerent kidnappers.
The decade-long legal fight has produced a 2,000-item court docket with mountains of paper in what may become a rare, and potentially precedent-setting, test of company liability for injuries to foreign nationals at the hands of a foreign government.
