Law as Geopolitics: Judicial Territory, Transnational Economic Governance, and American Power

The extension of domestic U.S. judicial authority to govern transnational economic relations involving foreign governments beyond official U.S. borders has been an important but largely overlooked component of the post–World War II international economic order. Using a critical spatial lens to analyze important U.S. common law changes, I show that a key strategy for achieving this extension has been redefining legal dichotomies to recode activity once considered public, political, and in the executive domain as private, commercial, nonpolitical, and judicial. This process has contributed to the depoliticization of fraught geopolitical conflicts and the production of a neoliberal global economy. The expansion of what I call judicial territory has occurred in response to acute political and economic challenges to U.S. interests and has been a means of forging an international economic order with the United States at the forefront. It has unilaterally extended U.S. state space and restricted the economic sovereignty of other countries, in ways that have benefited U.S. and transnational capital and underwritten the extraction of resources into the United States, especially from the Global South. At the same time, the unique characteristics of the common law have helped make these imperial relations hegemonic. Key Words: economy, hegemony, imperialism, law, territory.