JANE DOE 1 VERSUS UNOCAL

Katie Redford

Here’s how I remember my first deposition. It’s also my first memory of what it really means to be a radical lawyer.

It was the rainy season of 1997. I sat in the unnaturally cold, sterile hotel room in Bangkok.

We were suing the American energy company Unocal, which had built a pipeline through Burma with the brutal aid of the Burmese military government, and our first plaintiff was up. Jane Doe 1 walked in, wearing flip-flops and her sarong, and sat down at the long conference table with me, her other two lawyers, and Ka Hsaw Wa, the activist from Burma who had led the clandestine efforts to gather evidence and witnesses for our case. Directly across from us were the lawyers from Unocal, the multinational oil company. All of them were stern Americans in dark suits. Jane Doe 1 was 4’10” and one hundred pounds at most, and they towered over her. They were the big guys in the room (literally) and they knew it.

At the head of the table sat the court reporter, flown to Bangkok from Los Angeles to transcribe the sworn testimony of all of our clients. The deposition began. After the initial formalities—name, age, Where do you come from?—a Unocal lawyer asked her a series of questions, including whether she knew why she was there that day.

Seems like a straightforward question, but at that early stage in our litigation, it confirmed what we already suspected about Unocal’s theory of the case, and how they planned to defeat us. In Doe v. Unocal, the corporation talked about the case in ways that dismissed our clients and their lived experience—arguing that activists and political dissidents, like Ka Hsaw Wa, were using people like Jane Doe in a growing global movement that aimed to isolate and then overthrow the Burmese regime. They similarly suggested that anti-globalization and anti-capitalist activists were using our clients to paint negative pictures of corporations and what they did overseas. Or that our clients were pawns of environmentalists, who hated the pipeline because of its path through rain forests. They described our clients as victims of activists and movements who sought to use them in their own political battles. And they portrayed us, their lawyers, as militants using the legal system inappropriately for political and advocacy gains.

So when Unocal’s lawyers asked Jane Doe 1 if she knew why she was there, they were probably hoping and expecting that she would say something to validate such claims. Something like: “I’m here because EarthRights told me to be part of this lawsuit.” Or: “I’m here because Ka Hsaw Wa asked me to come.” Instead, what they got were words to this effect: “I’m here because your company and the soldiers killed my baby and I want justice.”

Silence.

After what seemed like a long moment, one of the lawyers blustered, “Move to strike, unresponsive”—an attempt to get the answer removed from the record. Judith Chomsky, one of our cocounsel, leaned over toward me and chuckled under her breath: “It was responsive, it just wasn’t the response you were expecting.”

In that moment, an early moment in a case that would take ten years, I felt like we had already won. In that moment, Jane Doe 1 was the most powerful person in the room, and everyone knew it. Most importantly, she knew it. It was at that point that I realized that one of my most critical roles, as her lawyer, was to open the door for her; to provide a forum for her to tell her story, to face those responsible, and to demand justice.

In the end, although we never went to trial, we “won” a successful settlement. Unocal paid a whole lot of money to our clients and the communities it had harmed. Jane Doe 1 was delighted to get the payout, but she told me that, for her, the money was not the win. The remedy for which our justice system allows—money—could not give her back her dead baby. It could not buy back the freedom and dignity lost by our clients forced to work as slaves on Unocal’s pipeline project. The win was the process itself: the agency that Jane Doe 1 and her fellow litigants exercised in seeking justice for themselves, and then being part of a precedent-setting case that would open similar doors for others from around the world. That’s what gave them power—and that power was there whether we won or lost the case.