Legalized imperialism: On Shaina Potts’ Judicial Territory

Abstract

Shaina Potts’ Judicial Territory provides a powerful, meticulously argued documentation of how the US court system, partiuclarly the Second District of New York and its geographical imaginary, has become the place from which Third World nationalizations and indebtedness are subject to a progressive expansion of the geographical territory subject to US court jurisdiction. She concludes that this has had the structural effect of systematically undermining Third World contestations of imperialism and Globalization. This monograph opens space for research that brings legal geographies, geographical political economy and globalization in conversation with one another. Expanding Potts’ scholarship to consider other case studies, other legal domains shaping globalization and other legal systems (particularly that of China) has the longer-term potential to develop a nuanced understanding of these relations and of lingering possibilities for Third World agency.