Law, Capital, and the Geographies of Empire
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Published:September 2024
This chapter situates judicial territory in relation to broader conceptualizations of capital and empire and summarizes the changing role of law in US empire over time. The chapter further suggests that different forms of law have distinct spatialities, which have, in turn, helped constitute the variegated geographies of both empire and capitalism. Contrasting post–World War II US judicial territory with the territoriality of earlier imperial formations, moreover, shows that the messy irregularity of judicial territory today does not mark a simple rupture from obsolete Westphalian “national” geographies, but rather a continuation by new means of previous imperial ones. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how and why judicial territory is uniquely well suited to legitimizing and obscuring ongoing imperial relations of hierarchical governance and extraction for an avowedly anti-imperial United States.