The law, financial subordination and the empire of capital: On Shaina Potts’ Judicial Territory

Judicial Territory offers an eye-opening account of the transnational expansion of the judicial reach of domestic American laws and courts. In this essay, I read the book through the prism of three areas of social scientific inquiry. First, I argue that the book makes a major conceptual and methodological contribution to debates on international financial subordination. More precisely, the book shows that the twin operations of money and the law act as a potent mechanism in the continuous financial subjugation of developing countries in the world market. Second, I critically engage with Judicial Territory ’s conceptual arguments on the articulations of law and empire, by bringing them into conversation with historical materialist thought on the constitutive role of law in capitalism. Third, I submit that the book gives us powerful tools to understand our turbulent present, insofar as it demonstrates that attempts to reconfigure state power and to redefine the rules of economic globalisation often take place on the negotiated terrain of the law.