Legal delay erodes pollution victims’ claims while benefiting corporations

Evidence

What emerges, then, is a contest between the tenacity of corporeal memory and the corrosive power, over time and space, of corporate amnesia emboldened by a neoliberal regime of deregulation. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 136

Although Animal’s People is set twenty years after the disaster, the novel dramatizes the illusion of the singular event: from a narrative perspective, the events—like the poisons themselves—are suspended in medias res, in a state of environmental, epidemiological, political, and legal irresolution. If the unfolding of slow violence across environmental time is typically managed through powerful strategies of distantiation, in Sinha’s novel those distancing strategies depend primarily, in geographical terms, on transnational corporate distance and, in temporal terms, on both the slow emergence of morbidity and on legal procrastination, which provide prevaricative cover for the CEOs who wish to exploit time to defuse the claims of the afflicted. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the law/institutions strand — thirteen judges across twenty years as institutional procrastination — and to manufacturing-doubt claims about corporations exploiting time from ch8. — connects to: Corporations deploy distancing strategies to wear down environmental justice campaigns — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 159; 1990s Supreme Court decisions systematically raised barriers to citizen environmental standing — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 596; Slow violence’s deferred consequences give polluters profitable cover for inaction — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 109
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 136; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 135

Broader Connections

• Slow violence’s deferred consequences give polluters profitable cover for inaction #exemplifies (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 109
• Corporations deploy distancing strategies to wear down environmental justice campaigns #exemplifies (0.80) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 159
• 1990s Supreme Court decisions systematically raised barriers to citizen environmental standing #expands (0.75) — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 596