Injurious Law : Nuclear Exposure and the Harms of Redress

Injurious Law offers a compelling portrait of the lives of veterans exposed to British nuclear tests as they seek compensation and healthcare. Trundle reveals how legal processes designed to offer redress exacerbate contested environmental injuries and generate cascading harms to the wellbeing of claimants and their families.

In the 1950s Britain joined the nuclear age, detonating 21 nuclear bomb experiments in Australia and the Pacific. In Injurious Law Catherine Trundle crosses countries and traverses decades to explore the lingering, metamorphizing impacts of radiation exposure and militarism. Through a compelling portrait of the lives of test veterans seeking compensation and healthcare, Trundle reveals how injury law, and the political and medical processes upon which it depends, generates a troubling paradox for claimants. While offering the possibilities for recognition and redress, the very process of making injury claims generates new and cascading harms. Recasting injury to include its social, moral and political aftereffects, Trundle exposes the quotidian and often banal practices that make the law injurious. Moving between archives, living rooms, laboratories, courts, parliament, and veteran social gatherings, Injurious Law offers a justice-centred lens for understanding legal contestations in the aftermath of radiation exposure and other invisible environmental harms.