Everyday Suffering and the Abstract Time-Reckoning of Law

Abstract

How does time structure the allocation of responsibility in the context of large-scale corporate crimes? Focusing on the Processo Eternit – a criminal case brought against the former main investor in Europe’s largest asbestos-processing factory in Casale Monferrato (Italy) – this article compares the temporal order of the lived experience of the asbestos disaster in the affected community with the abstract time-reckoning of law. The everyday suffering in the form of the long-term health effects, inscribed in the body through the asbestos fibre, collides with the statute of limitation of the alleged crimes, as stipulated in law and endorsed in the court room. It examines how these incommensurable temporalities reconfigure the allocation of moral and legal responsibility for an industrial disaster and shows how these contradictions are related to the victims’ expectations of justice and their experience of injustice.