Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire with Shaina Potts
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome back to the podcast of the Second Cold War Observatory. I'm Seth Schindler, and as usual, I'm here with my co-host, Jessica DiCarlo. How are you, Jess?

Hi, Seth. Yeah, I'm doing well. It's sort of spring in Utah, but we got snow at our house today. So snow is a little wild, but hanging in there. Yeah. Great. Great. What stories are you looking at these days?

Oh, that's a great question. I have, I've actually been on calls and thinking about copper and critical minerals all morning. So I've been actually, if you're sitting at the University of Utah, and you look across the valley, you can see the Bingham Canyon mine. And that's a project that I've been thinking about. It's the largest copper mine in the US. So thinking about water issues and the communities that are affected by them. Fascinating. Yeah, yeah. How about you, Seth?

Oh, you know, I was watching the news related to Donald Trump's visit to the Middle East. It's obviously changing things in a lot of different domains and networks that we've looked at from artificial intelligence to diplomacy and foreign policy and regional politics as well. So there was a lot to cover there. We'll have a wide ranging discussion today that covers quite a few of these topics, in fact.

That's right. We're very lucky today to have Dr. Shaina Potts on the podcast. Shaina is an economic, legal, and political geographer who challenges the idea that globalization has made nation-states and borders irrelevant. Much of her research instead shows how transnational economic relations are deeply grounded in legal systems, institutional practices, and state power. And her work traces the technical minutia of contracts and financial instruments alongside legal frameworks.

So a lot of what we talk about today, I think, will be maybe surprising for a lot of people listening to think about how domestic American legal instruments end up operating transnationally. We'll discuss her recent book that came out in 2024, Judicial Territory, Law Capital and the Expansion of American Empire. In it, she uncovers the largely overlooked role of U.S. judicial authority and common law in expanding American power abroad. Shana, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

So I have to say, I loved reading your book. It was completely eye-opening historically and thinking about geopolitics today. And I see so many connections to what's happening in the U.S. between the judicial and legal system at the moment.

So I wanted to open with kind of a scene setting question. In the book, you show how US courts routinely issue rulings that are enforced in other countries by other governments. And this is probably news to some of our listeners. But as you explain in the book, it's quite routine. So can you explain how this works from a legal standpoint and perhaps how this came to be?

Yeah, great. So, so I would rephrase the question just slightly, which is that my focus is not so much on the way other governments enforce US judgments, although other foreign courts do enforce US judgments regularly as well, but on the way that transnational US court orders, so court orders issued by

US courts are obeyed by foreign actors sort of on their own. So not enforced by governments per se, but actors. Yeah. And as you said, it is quite routine and in sort of law and business circles considered totally mundane at this point. But I think for many of us coming from outside those circles, it seems actually quite bizarre and surprising when we first find out about this. Legally, there are a few mechanisms that allow this for cases involving only private parties.

So not involving governments. The most basic mechanism for this are simply governing law clauses, which are clauses in major commercial contracts that allow parties to a transaction to decide for themselves which law and which courts will govern their contract in case of a dispute. In many cases, even if there is no spatial connection between the transaction in question and the law that they choose.

But when it comes to suits involving foreign governments, which is my specific focus in the book, it's been a little bit more complicated because of the principle of foreign sovereign immunity and the active state doctrine, which I'm happy to talk about the distinction. But for simplicity's sake, maybe I'll just refer to sovereign immunity. This principle has basically said for a long time that courts cannot sue immigrants.

foreign governments or foreign officials or seize foreign property in relation to their official or public acts or activities. For a long time before the 1940s, official government acts were considered to include many of the sort of economic activities that have since been redefined as private and commercial.

And so that's been one of the primary mechanisms by which U.S. judicial power has been extended is by redefining the public-private divide to reclassify a lot of activity that used to fall in the category of political activity and more specifically foreign policy from the perspective of the U.S. government as merely private and commercial activity.

Thank you. That's absolutely fascinating. And I loved how you showed in the book this narrowing of the political and how the private expanded as a result. And you offer so many remarkable examples in the book. It starts with this extraordinary case where a New York court orders Ghanaian authorities to seize a ship from Argentina. What was the legal justification for this ruling? And how does it relate to your concept of judicial territory?

Basically, this case arose out of a lawsuit by a handful of New York-based hedge funds who had bought up distressed Argentinian sovereign debt after Argentina's debt crisis in 2001 and were attempting to sue Argentina for full recovery of the face value plus all of the interest accrued on that debt rather than participating in the debt restructurings that most of the Argentine creditors had participated in. So basically, these hedge funds had managed to

get a number of court orders in New York against Argentina. But Argentina actually had not obeyed these court orders, which is quite unusual in these sorts of cases, and had been refusing to pay the judgments. So that vulture fund then, as they're often known, took those New York judgments, took a New York court order to a court in Ghana and convinced a Ghanaian judge to

to issue an injunction to seize an Argentinian vessel that happened to have been docked in the port of Tema. And the Ghanaian authorities did, in fact, take over the ship and hold it for over two months in the port of Tema. Meanwhile, Argentina appealed both in the Ghanaian court system and to the United Nations. And eventually, actually, both the UN and the Supreme Court of Ghana determined that the lower court had erred

But crucially, it was not because they were objecting per se to the sort of transnational enforcement of U.S. judgments, but rather because they determined this to be actually a public vessel. It was an off-duty military or naval vessel.

And the hedge funds argue that because it was off duty, it could be considered private and therefore could be sort of seized as in payment for these judgments. But the UN and the Supreme Court of Ghana said, no, this is in fact a military vessel. And therefore, this violates the principles of sovereign immunity. And the vessel was eventually released.

This all sounds very dramatic. Can you tell us how this plays out? I'm imagining a scene from Law and Order, right, where the judge is, you know, ruling in front of this large courtroom of people. Or is it really just mundane for people who work in this space? It's kind of everyday occurrence. Is it really just a judge meeting with a small group of lawyers from boutique law firms specializing in this kind of law? And can you give some idea of the process? Yeah.

I guess I don't know what it was like in the Ghanaian court. I imagine that probably was a pretty small hearing originally, at least, but maybe not by the time it got to the Supreme Court. I don't know. But, yeah, I'd say my sense is that early on, before I was paying attention to the case of these hedge funds suing Argentina, it probably was sort of these sort of boutique cases.

courtroom scenes, as you said. By the time I started really paying attention in about 2012, after the seizure of the ship in Ghana on behalf of these hedge funds, this case had achieved a kind of celebrity among

legal and policy in legal and policy circles. And so actually, the courtroom was quite packed in many of these in many of the hearings for these. And there were all kinds of financial journalists and legal journalists, as well as as well as those direct participants in the proceedings. But I think that's fairly unusual for these kinds of cases. This paints a really fascinating scene. And your book does a great job of bringing in the spatiality of

this process. So you have this concept of judicial territory. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah. So in the book, I use the concept judicial territory to refer to the entire space over which U.S. courts regularly exercise authority. And what the book really tries to do is map the kind of outer contours of that space as it has expanded since World War II to include more and more transnational actors and types of economic activities. So

Legal and business folks are very well aware of the complex transnational jurisdictional reach of courts like the United States and some others. But generally speaking, they refer to this in terms of jurisdiction, not territory, or in certain cases in terms of extraterritoriality.

And I make the argument in the book that neither concept quite captures what I think is going on here. I prefer the term territory to think about judicial territory and territoriality in reference to a much broader conversation in critical geography about territory for a few reasons. One, I think it really foregrounds the way that space has not actually become unimportant as the conversations about

trans complex jurisdiction often suggests space has not actually become unimportant but rather remains central to these cases and in fact many of these cases about the expansion of judicial power at least really revolve around struggles over precisely how the spatial reach of these courts should be determined often especially in these cases involving foreign governments that conversation is explicitly made in terms of sovereignty and territory

as well. But more broadly, I think the concept of territoriality foregrounds the role of power and struggle and the centrality of space here. I also prefer the term territory to simply using the term extraterritoriality for a few reasons. One, that term tends to be used by legal scholars in a much more restricted way to refer to a very specific set of statutes that are sort of explicitly extraterritorial. But the other reason is that the term extraterritoriality

tends to assume a simple binary division between or sort of a clear demarcation between what counts as domestic and what counts as beyond the borders of a state. And in my investigations, what I found was that it was often precisely how to define the boundary between domestic and foreign that was at stake in these struggles.

All this talk about spatial theory is music to my ears as a trained geographer, but I want to bring us back to the rulings themselves. At first, as I started reading, I couldn't understand why foreign governments would obey U.S. court rulings, even if it's reluctant to do so. So in the case of Ghana or Argentina and many others that you cover, why don't they just simply ignore court rulings? Yeah, it's a really important question.

The fact is, as you were saying, almost always these foreign governments do obey these US orders with the sort of temporary exception of Argentina in this debt case, which is quite interesting. And legal scholars talk more broadly about an enforcement problem in transnational law because unlike with domestic law, there is, of course, no transnational police force that can go in and sort of enforce the rulings in a sort of physical sense in the way there is with domestic legal orders.

So legal scholars often talk about the puzzle of sort of transnational legal enforcement. My own sense is that it's actually quite simple, sort of maybe overly simple in that it's really a simple matter of US power and US geopolitical power, but also more specifically in these cases, US economic power. And the fact is that any government or company that refuses to obey one of these orders will have a very hard time operating

in US economic space or specifically interacting in any way with the US financial system, which of course basically means that it becomes very difficult to operate internationally in terms of an international financial markets at all.

And so it's not the case that Argentina would obey Zimbabwean court order, for example, in the same way as it would obey a U.S. court order in most cases. That said, these governments often do spend millions of dollars going to court to try to fight these orders in the United States.

So I'm curious, then, if the authority of U.S. courts is underpinned by the strength of the U.S. economy, will countries then be more likely to ignore rulings in New York if the U.S. economy is weakened as we're seeing things like, you know, the rise of China or if countries lose access to the U.S. market because of things like trade barriers? Or will they still enforce these kind of U.S. orders and U.S. court orders?

Yeah, I think that's sort of the question in relation to judicial territory and U.S. legal power going forwards. My basic answer to the question is that in the long run, yes, as U.S. economic power declines, I think their legal power will decline as well. I think it's unclear whether that means in the next decade or in the next century and so on. And

There's a few reasons why this might take quite a while, even if relative US economic strength declines quite quickly. One is that until there's an alternative to the US financial system in particular, there's no real way for foreign countries or companies to get around these US court orders. I think China may be trying to create a kind of alternative financial architecture, so that will be an interesting challenge.

The tariffs themselves, I think, won't be enough on their own to drive that sort of change because there are so many other points of connection still to U.S. economic strength and so on. And then, you know, I think there are a lot of questions about how long the U.S. and New York in particular will sort of stay on as a key economic powerhouse, even as overall U.S. power and economic might decline. And so, for example, the sort of

Other most important transnational legal space in the world is England's transnational legal space, hooked, of course, to the power of London, as well as to London's many sort of connections to various former colonies and so on. So you can see there an example of a legal space that has remained incredibly important.

important attached to a sort of financial hub, even as the power of England as a kind of geopolitical entity has declined. So I think it's sort of too early to know how that will look for the United States and U.S. judicial territory going forwards.

Yeah, in the conclusion of the book, you mentioned Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and I really kind of honed in on that and just have one quick follow up question. As a China scholar thinking about this constant narrative of non-interference of China and other governments and their legal systems or with the Belt and Road Initiative and all of that, I wonder if you think or have thought about how this idea of non-interference from China will kind of coincide with China's expansion in this space?

That's a great question. I mean, I should preface this by saying that I'm not well informed about Chinese law at all, although I've wondered many times what this will look like. My general understanding is that China has been trying to make its commercial law and court system more sort of

match more closely with Western style legal systems over time. And it's been doing that in part to make foreign companies and so on more comfortable using Chinese courts and Chinese governing law clauses. So my sense is that there certainly is an attempt and presumably China will China's own sort of legal space in this sense will expand over time.

I think that's a fantastic question. How will China's different understandings of foreign sovereignty, of sovereignty, excuse me, and sovereign immunity play into that? Where will those be distinctions between the way Chinese legal territoriality works and U.S. legal territoriality? I think it's a really interesting question.

you explain in the book that in many instances, the judicial branch and the executive branch of US government were at odds with one another. And I found it interesting how their relationship changed over time because initially,

it seemed as though the judicial branch deferred to the executive branch. And that's what I always learned in school, right? Foreign policy is the domain of the executive branch. But this later changed. And in some cases, well, you pointed out the case of Argentina, where the executive branch in that instance, actually supported the Argentine government, right? And it was the judicial branch that said, actually, no, we'll rule on this. And this doesn't have to do with foreign policy. It's

Private commercial law, if I understood that correctly. So where is power in all of this in the US government right now at this moment? Is it more with the executive branch or the judicial branch?

Yeah, that's a great question. Maybe I could start sort of a little further back in time and then try to come back to the present moment, if that's OK. Yes, I think I see the rise of in the extension of the U.S. judicial power, U.S. judicial territory from roughly World War Two onwards, precisely as being about a shift in the modality of U.S. power.

that operates abroad. More specifically, I see it as a shift in the sort of imperial modalities of U.S. power. So whereas many of the types of economic situations I focus on in the book, things like post-colonial imperialism,

state-led development efforts, the running of state-owned enterprises, nationalizations of resources, fiscal policy in response to debt crises, and so on. Many of those things before roughly 1945, when they came up, were considered to be foreign policy issues that the U.S. judicial system was not equipped to handle. Rather, they were dealt with on a kind of diplomatic, bilateral diplomatic basis by usually the Department of State.

as precisely foreign policy questions. And there'd be, you know, of course, there's the famous cases of sort of 19th century gunboat diplomacy, but alongside probably the much more common cases of dollar diplomacy or sort of other types of coercion, but also negotiation and settlement between the Department of State and these foreign governments. And what happens after World War II is that, in my view, as widespread decolonization happens,

takes off as the US frames itself as an avowedly anti-colonial power and as the kinds of explicit military, but also simply economic coercion that the US used, especially in the Western hemisphere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, become sort of unpalatable in the post-World War II period.

And at the same time, post-colonial states begin taking on sort of these third worldist projects of sort of more interventionist economic activities. U.S. investors, first and foremost, but also the U.S. government, including both the executive branch and the judiciary, tried to find a way to maintain the interest of U.S. capital.

in a way that fit with the US's anti-imperial self-understanding in this moment. And so I think in large part because of the sort of political context at the time, the executive branch, the Department of State in particular, actually became quite uncomfortable

having to handle these sort of negotiations with foreign governments and instead tried to shunt responsibility for this often to the judiciary. So in the early decades, it was often the executive branch that was explicitly telling the judiciary to take on more authority in these types of cases, in large part by saying, hey, you know what, these aren't really political matters after all. It's okay to treat these as merely

sort of apolitical commercial questions. The courts for their part were sort of

of at various times, depending on the specifics of particular courts and judges, but also the details of different types of cases, were sometimes sort of eager to take on that authority and sometimes actually much more hesitant. And so there was over several decades, actually a lot of back and forth between the executive and the judiciary about exactly where that dividing line between sort of foreign policy and sort of merely private commercial activity should be drawn. But as you said, it's absolutely right that really through the end of

of the 20th century, the courts in any case involving foreign governments

Even where the court said in the end, yes, this is a commercial matter and therefore it's okay for us to sort of issue, you know, to take authority here. The courts tended to be very deferential to the executive branch when the executive branch wanted to make a sort of suggestion or a policy intervention. And that's really what changed in the 21st century. That's especially visible in the Argentine case, as I discuss in the book. And by that point, I think it's a

There are multiple causes for this, but by that point, the courts really say, "Hey, we've been through this. These are merely commercial, apolitical private matters. They have nothing to do with you, executive branch." And especially under someone like Justice Scalia, for example, they can even be very scornful towards the executive branch representatives who try to intervene in those cases.

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So I guess a really compelling case that you offer in the book on this struggle between post-colonial governments and U.S. courts takes place in Cuba in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. I wonder if you could tell us more about that case and what it tells us more broadly about judicial territory. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that's

One chapter in the book focuses on the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution and what happens when Cuba nationalizes a whole lot of foreign, sorry, of U.S. owned property. And here is a great example of this kind of shifting of authority from the executive branch to the judiciary that I had mentioned, because nationalization cases, of course, were not

unheard of before this. The Soviet Union in particular had nationalized significant properties in the first half of the 20th century. And up until the 1960s, really, after the Cuban Revolution, those were considered firmly in the domain of public acts that had to be handled by the executive branch. And that was generally a matter of the State Department negotiating some kind of reduced compensation. It was never full compensation.

for the nationalized property with the Soviet Union or other actors who carried out nationalizations. In the wake of the Cuban nationalizations, however, the courts and the executive branch were trying really hard to figure out how to bring the

these cases under US judicial authority. And it was actually harder to do this with nationalization than with many of the other examples in the book, because the act of expropriation had been explicitly classified only a few years earlier by US courts as a public act. So they had to find a way to do this that didn't involve per se saying that nationalizing property was not a public action.

This was a case that involved the act of state doctrine rather than foreign sovereign immunity per se, or this was a situation that often involved the act of state doctrine, which said that

Courts in the United States could not weigh in on the validity of the act of a foreign government in its own territory if that had been a public act. So this prevented U.S. courts up until the 1960s from declaring foreign nationalizations to be invalid. However, going into the 1960s, some of the lower U.S. courts tried to sort of rewrite that and say, well, these

nationalizations are actually different. They aren't really public because they were discriminatory and basically prejudiced against Americans.

And they also they drew direct parallels between Nazi discrimination against Jews and the expropriation of Jewish property in the lead up to World War II or to the Holocaust and what was happening in Cuba. And so they said, therefore, these are sort of private acts rather than public acts. They also said that they were in violation of, quote unquote, international law and that therefore that issue sort of superseded the act of state doctrine. Interestingly, here in 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court actually struck down

those lower court decisions and in the first major case involving a Cuban nationalization, in this case of sugar,

The Supreme Court said, no, actually, those arguments won't hold. This is a public act. U.S. courts have long recognized nationalizations as public acts. This is a public act in a foreign territory. Therefore, we can't declare it illegal. However, in the process, they also weakened the active state doctrine by saying that it was based on a kind of old fashioned idea of territoriality.

And that what really mattered was whether or not this case should be seen as political from the standpoint of the U.S. executive branch, which is to say, would ruling in this case potentially interfere with U.S. foreign relations?

And so they determined in the first case in 1964, Sabatino case, that indeed, because this was such a sort of heated and controversial issue for Cuba and other post-colonial states, that this was a sort of political question that the court should not weigh in on. However, they sort of left the door open for a sort of weakening of that case going forward. And then in the 1970s, in 1976, U.S. Supreme Court case, after a number of other cases that had sort of chipped away at

the sort of nationalization question in other ways, they ended up declaring that while a court in the US could not declare a nationalization per se,

to be illegal, they could determine that any sort of commercial activities connected to that operation were invalid, such as continuing to run the business that had been nationalized and so on. And so they could sort of get at parts of the nationalization that way. But basically, the courts ended up actually leaving the public status of expropriations intact.

but sort of chipping away at so much of the surrounding architecture around nationalizations that they're able to, in effect, say that we won't uphold any nationalization as valid unless U.S. definitions, U.S. standards of full compensation are paid.

I'd like to ask some questions about the present. And we should say that your book was published in 2024. And I'm sure you finished it long before that, because the timeline that it takes for a book to come out. And the last 100, 120 days have been completely nuts. It's May 20th right now in the afternoon. Everything could be different in five minutes.

But I'd like to ask you a bit about judicial territory and how this has played out so far in the current context where so much of your book is about the narrowing of the political. Well, it seems like that is completely exploded, right? I mean, we have many governments now that are imposing all sorts of things like investment screening, export controls, state capitalism is back again.

As those things have been reintroduced after a long hiatus of neoliberal globalization, how have courts responded? Yeah, that's a great question. The short answer is that I've been thinking a lot about this question over the last decade.

two years now, as you said, basically since I finished the book, I think one of the main things I've been thinking about is trying to engage with more of the literature on the new state capitalism in which someone like Ilya Salami, for example, has pointed out that the legal mechanisms in particular behind something like foreign investment screening mechanisms, but I think we could say also all sorts of other policies like Biden's industrial policies and similar policies in other countries, of course, are precisely about a sort of

re-enlargement of the political economic sphere, right? Of saying that these economic activities are not merely commercial, but actually are political and therefore precisely in the domain of the executive branch. And it's now under the kind of discretionary authority of the executive who can, you know, issue orders or block certain investments or make tariffs or, or

do all sorts of things. And I see this as a pretty radical sea change from precisely the processes that I was documenting in the book that are about the sort of narrowing of the political and the enlargement of the commercial category. To me, it's still an open question whether that necessarily means that we're now seeing a diminishment of the authority of

courts and U.S. courts in particular in relation to these questions, or whether there's a more complicated dynamic going on here where we have both extensive U.S. judicial power that holds most of the time in these types of arenas, but also as now sort of re-enlargement of executive power in these

domains as well. Surely, as you're suggesting, Seth, these will sort of rub up against each other at certain moments. And I guess I would say that's on my list of things to look into. I haven't actually come across any particular examples yet. I haven't come to my attention where, for example, a foreign company is sort of suing for breach of contract

because of Biden's industrial policy or because of the Trump tariffs or something like that. But I feel certain that they're coming if they haven't already. And I think then we will get a very interesting. I could imagine a scenario where a foreign government faces some sort of judicial decision because they violate U.S. government interests. Whereas, you know, what you're writing about usually is that

foreign governments are doing something to creditors that are suing them in U.S. courts. But I wonder if we're going to see some sort of expansion of judicial territory when foreign governments cross the Trump administration's export controls or what have you.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's exactly the question to be asking. And I guess I think part of the answer will depend on the extent to which U.S. courts have really sort of shifted to see themselves as being sort of as operating solely in the service of private capital and upholding the liberal international economic rules, you know, that were sort of set up after in the post-World War II era. Or to what extent do they say, well, we're sort of

Now these have sort of become foreign policy questions again, and therefore we're sort of ceding our authority here. I think...

the neoliberalization of the judiciary itself had run quite deep by the first decades of the 21st century, a gradual transformation over the last 40 or 50 years before that. So I think there are certainly my guess is that some judges will try very hard to sort of hold on to those to sort of that aspect of their function. Of course, on the other side,

In addition to the neoliberalization of many judges over the last 40 or 50 years, though, there's also been the rise, of course, we are all now much more aware of a right wing judicial system.

school, right, that is maybe most of the time not so concerned with economic questions per se, but that surely has a very different socio legal training from many of these sort of key neoliberal judges. So I think that will also be part of the showdown is sort of how did these different schools of legal thought within the judiciary end up playing out?

So I want to return to the conclusion now, and it relates to what you just said. There's a great line that jumped out at me. It says, the expansion of U.S. judicial territory in the 40s through the 90s set the stage for transnational economic governance in the 21st century. So it's almost as though we get neoliberal globalization, which is supposedly transnational, but at its core is the U.S. legal system, right? And that is how the U.S. exercises hegemony.

But what struck me is that, I mean, it's apparent now, the US government, or under Trump anyway, is abandoning that post-war economic order and the liberal international order, not just abandoning it, just tearing it down. And so...

On one hand, I'm asking myself why, because it did come with a lot of privileges for the US exorbitant privilege of US dollar hegemony and also its legal system, which was globally recognized as you demonstrate. But if that international order is torn down, will US judicial power remain or will certain countries stop obeying? I mean, I guess you could answer that in many ways, but what's going to happen in the future? That's the basic question.

Yeah. Yes. Well, I do think that's the question as well. So, I mean, I think in terms of the Trump administration, in addition to the sort of longer standing rise of a certain brand of right wing judicial actors and so on, with a very different set of concerns and commitments, perhaps, than many others.

Mm-hmm.

matters. I expect that there will be knock-on effects, you know, in terms of private contracts that might have chosen New York law before, perhaps being more inclined to shift to other legal spaces. Now, the most sort of immediate other choice would be English law. So there, I don't think you see a slight shift in sort of the center of gravity. But English law has an immensely important transnational legal footprint as well. So that wouldn't be probably a major sea change.

you know, in the sort of global legal economic order, although it might have real ramifications for the US. Right. But but then but, you know, I think it would be sort of a bigger question is maybe we talked a little bit before about that is to what extent does China or some of the other Southeast Asian legal financial centers that have been trying to take on more and more of that legal business for some time now, to what extent are they able to kind of step into this gap?

and offer much more predictable, secure legal governance than the US seems to offer. I think to me, one of the big questions for how the future of global capitalism unfolds really is the extent to which China in particular, but these sort of other legal financial centers as well, basically adopt the same commercial rules.

that the US and English courts have been upholding for the last 70 years or so now, but do it in a way that bolsters East Asian power more than Western power? Or, and maybe this goes back to your question, Jessica, about Chinese ideas about sovereignty, right? Or to what extent are there some significant differences in the substance of that law?

that reshape not only sort of where the locus of capitalist power is, but also the sort of forms that that power takes. To me, that's a sort of an open question in part because I simply don't know enough about these other legal systems, but also I think because they're still in flux to a certain extent.

Shaina, thank you so much for this incredibly illuminating conversation. And I know that Seth and I will be watching the role of legal mechanisms more closely in our work as well. So we'll link the book in our episode notes and highly recommend people go out and read it. And I have two questions for you before we go. The first is, if you have any final thoughts you want to leave our listeners with, perhaps recommendations for further reading, what's been inspiring you lately, what you've been listening to. And also, if we want to think with

this concept of judicial territory, what should we be looking at or what are you looking at now? Yeah, great. Thank you so much, both of you. I've been sort of shifting my own interests empirically to think about critical minerals and some of the sort of geopolitical, economic and legal questions.

and surrounding critical minerals but i'd say more broadly for me that's been based in an attempt to understand um precisely some of the questions that you two raise about how um the sort of resurgence of more explicitly interventionist state capitalism in north and south is reshaping some of the types of questions that i had been looking at

you know, in this book over the last, in a longer historical framework. I guess conceptually, one of the things I've been trying to do is think about how judicial, U.S. judicial territoriality is shifting in this moment, but also more broadly might be useful for thinking about other dimensions of U.S.,

legal governance. So for example, the role of sort of executive economic interventions and rules and so on, trade policies, export import controls, etc. But also the way that trade regimes and investment trade and investment treaties themselves create a certain kind of legal transnational legal space as well. And how we might be seeing the emergence of sort of new

of these sort of overlapping, but also transnational trade legal territorialities, if that makes sense. So I think my hope is that the concept of legal territoriality, which may or may not be tied to judiciaries in the

Any particular case is useful more broadly for thinking about the way that law restructures economic space at many different scales. And so I remain especially interested in that sort of overlapping, sort of interpenetrating and very porous area of competing transnational legal spaces. Specifically, you know, until Trump's recent election, I had been looking into the Inflation Reduction Act and its critical mineral rules and the way that domestic

content provisions were actually much more complex than they seem on the surface and actually themselves were establishing new transnational domains of quote unquote domestic U.S. space for the purposes of critical minerals trading. And now, of course, under the new administration, things are looking very different in

Again, so a lot of what I've been doing is simply, you know, as many of us reading the news every day and trying to get a handle on how quickly these things are changing. There's plenty to look at these days, isn't there? Yes, very much. I guess I would say for I think anyone who's especially interested in transnational economic

economic geography and law, I would recommend Joshua Barkin's work. His book Corporate Sovereignty from I think 2013 or something remains a really critical

as for foundational work in my view for thinking about the way law operates as a particular modality of power in the global economy, as well as his sort of more recent work on the topic. And then I've been looking at a lot of work by some people related to the second Cold War Observatory and sort of the debates on the new state capitalism

in particular, including, of course, Ilyas Alami and Adam Dixon's recent book, The Specter of State Capitalism, but a lot of other work in this domain to try to think precisely about these questions about how are sort of new forms of economic power that are largely enshrined with the executive branch and with a kind of more ad hoc

approach? How are they starting to intersect with or compete or potentially overtake these judicial forms of power that I've been focusing on? Wonderful. Thank you so much again for joining us. And I know our listeners will be thinking differently about legal borders and global power after this.

This has been the Second Cold War Observatory podcast. I'm Jessica DiCarlo. And if you enjoyed this episode, please check out www.secondcoldwareobservatory.com. And thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.