Insights and Ironies: The American Bhopal Cases

Abstract

This paper deals with the question whether an American court should have accepted jurisdiction over the Bhopal disaster case. On the usual presumption of the truth of the allegations concerning the American company's responsibility for the disaster, it is argued that failure to take jurisdiction was unwarranted, and predicted that the injured plaintiffs would not be afforded timely relief in India, a prediction that was tragically borne out during the decade that followed.