Social Sciences Research Building, The Tea Room (2nd Floor), 5:00-6:30pm
Speaker: Shaina Potts is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Geography and Global Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research sits at the intersection of geography, international political economy and critical legal studies, with an emphasis on post-colonial sovereign debt relations, transnational law, and the politics of territory.
Abstract: Critical analyses of the post-World War II international economic order have examined the role of ostensibly neutral and universal international rules in perpetuating post-colonial economic inequalities, within a system of juridically sovereign nation-states. What has been largely overlooked, however, is the extension of domestic US common law beyond official US borders during this same period. In this talk I consider how the expansion of what I call “US judicial territory” since World War II has unilaterally extended US state space and restricted the economic sovereignty of other countries. Drawing on examples from nationalization cases in the 1960s and sovereign debt cases in the 1980s and 2010s, I show: 1) that the expansion of US judicial territory has occurred in response to acute geopolitical or economic challenges to US power; 2) that the key strategy for achieving this expansion has been the redefinition of dichotomous categories (e.g. public/private, political/economic) within US law in ways that have facilitated the de-politicization and neoliberalization of transnational economic relations; and 3) that discourses rooted in these common law practices are in turn iteratively deployed to shape other institutions of international economic governance. The result of all this has been to underwrite an international economic order that enables the continued extraction of resources from South to North, to the benefit of both capital in general and the United States in particular.