Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire

In Judicial Territory, I trace the development of US domestic law involving foreign sovereign governments in order to argue that, from the 1940s on, American empire became increasingly bound up with the transnational extension of US judicial authority over the economic decisions of postcolonial governments. Introducing the term “judicial territory” to refer to this increasingly transnational space over which US courts regularly wield authority, I consider cases involving private US companies, on the one hand, and foreign state-owned enterprises, nationalizations, and sovereign debt, on the other, in order to show that transnational economic issues that had previously been considered the domain of ad hoc foreign policy and the executive branch, were increasingly recoded as merely legal issues suited for judicial oversight. In the process, the technical legal arguments through which these changes were carried out contributed to the broader construction of a neoliberal vision of “the economy” and to the form of globalizing capitalism that became dominant in the late 20th and into the 21st centuries. Of course, both US hegemony and neoliberal hegemony are currently collapsing. Towards the end of the talk, I consider possible futures of (US) judicial territory in the current context, as well as how a broader conception of “legal territorialities” may be useful for understanding increasingly interventionist and competitive industrial and trade policies in the US and elsewhere.

Speaker: Shaina Potts, UC Los Angeles