Discipline all the way down: Law and capital in Shaina Potts’ Judicial Territory

This commentary engages Shaina Potts’ Judicial Territory as a significant methodological contribution to economic geography – one that draws crucial attention to the (often opaque) relationship between law and capitalism and provides geographers with a set of tools to penetrate it. Highlighting three key elements of Potts’ approach to the study of capitalist sociospatial relations, I explore how her focus on the law makes visible actors, logics and modes of political and economic discipline that have largely remained hidden from view in economic geography. First, Potts frames law as a ‘structuring link’ between capitalism and imperialism, developing a theoretical perspective that sheds light on the legal production of uneven development and social difference. Second, she outlines a method of ‘geographically relational’ legal analysis that offers practical lessons for incorporating law into political-economic investigations. And third, through her analytical focus on episodes of legal struggle and contestation, Potts reveals how diverse sets of forces, actors and motivations come together to produce legal change. Here, Judicial Territory highlights the complexity of legal transformation and its relationship to capitalist globalization without losing sight of a basic motivation behind it: the drive to discipline Third World states and repress non-capitalist forms of economic life.