legal person

Justine Augier

(Actes Sud, 288 pages, 2024)

***Long-listed for Prix littéraire « Le Monde » 2024***

Cement manufacturer Lafarge, once a flagship of French industry, faced both French and U.S. courts for having maintained at all costs its operations at its Jalabiya plant in war-torn Syria. Until September 2014, Lafarge paid millions of dollars to jihadist groups, such as ISIS, in taxes, rights-of-way, and ransoms. Lafarge ruthlessly exposed its Syrian employees to terrorist threat while sheltering its expatriate staff. The company was eventually accused and convicted of financing terrorism and complicity in crimes against humanity.

After Shell in Nigeria and Chiquita Brands International in Columbia, the Lafarge scandal is among significant international legal cases reported in the media that aim to make corporations accountable for their roles in human rights violations. In Legal Person, author Justine Augier digs further by restoring the density of language and time in a gripping narrative that relentlessly unravels the mechanisms of corporate impunity and how it impacts the lives of real people. She documents the hard work of a handful of young women—lawyers, jurists, interns—who want to believe in justice, devoting their intelligence and inventiveness toward making the notion of liability tangible and forcing the “legal person” that is the company to answer for its actions. Their aim, beyond calling for managerial responsibility, is to shed light on how obsession with profit, avoidance tactics, and cynical distancing make the unthinkable possible.

Above all, Augier listens to each group involved in the story, taking an equal interest in all of them: shareholders, managers, their local contacts, workers, and intermediaries. In her distinctive narrative approach, in which she embeds words and expressions borrowed from different registers of speech, language itself becomes a protagonist. This book is a quest for truth, meticulously untangling a web of hard-to-believe facts, and tracking down the cracks and fissures in language and law from which justice might emerge.

 Justine Augier is the author of Croire: Sur les pouvoirs de la littérature (Actes Sud, 2023), De l'ardeur: Histoire de Razan Zaitouneh, avocate syrienne  (Actes Sud, 2017; Prix Renaudot essai, 2017), Les Idées noires (Actes Sud, 2015), and En règle avec la nuit (Stock, 2010; Prix Fénéon, 2011).