Maghreb Petroleum Exploration, S.A., et al. v. John Paul DeJoria

Respondent John Paul DeJoria is a billionaire who co-founded a Moroccan company, was found liable in Moroccan court for defrauding Petitioners and ordered to pay $122.9 million in damages. After the Fifth Circuit in 2015 ruled against DeJoria in his attempt to avoid U.S. recognition of the Moroccan court’s judgment, DeJoria lobbied the Texas Legislature to revise Texas’s Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act to add new defenses and, in 2017, got the Legislature to apply the newly revised Act retroactively to allow him to defeat recognition. The first question presented is: Whether the retroactive application of the 2017 Texas Act violates the anti-retroactivity provisions of the Federal and the Texas Constitutions?

The district court granted DeJoria’s motion to deny recognition of the Moroccan under the retroactively applied 2017 Texas Act. Texas law required the Fifth Circuit to review that judgment de novo and the Fifth Circuit applied de novo review in its 2015 decision. Yet the panel broke with established precedent in this case and applied the “clear error” standard of review. The second question presented is: Whether, under Erie, federal courts of appeal should apply the state-law standard of review in foreign country money judgment recognition cases.