Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire with Shaina Potts

Jun 21, 2025

In a compelling discussion, Shaina Potts, an Associate Professor at UCLA and expert in economic geography, delves into her groundbreaking work on how U.S. courts have evolved into instruments of global economic power. She reveals the legal mechanisms that facilitate America’s expansion beyond its borders, including the complexities of foreign sovereign immunity. Additionally, Potts examines case studies illustrating judicial imperialism and explores the implications of rising powers like China and Russia on the future of global legal dynamics.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Judicial Expansion via Sovereign Immunity

U.S. courts have extended their reach by redefining foreign governments' economic acts as private commercial activities.
This legal shift weakens traditional sovereign immunity, expanding American judicial influence globally.

ANECDOTE

Argentina Ship Seizure in Ghana

Hedge funds used U.S. court rulings to seize an Argentine ship docked in Ghana as payment enforcement.
Despite initial success, the ship was released after Ghana's Supreme Court and the UN ruled it was protected sovereign military property.

INSIGHT

Concept of Judicial Territory

The concept of 'judicial territory' frames U.S. courts' global authority beyond simple jurisdiction or extraterritoriality.
Spatial power struggles shape how far U.S. court influence extends and how sovereignty boundaries are defined.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

In this episode, we sit down with Shaina Potts, author of Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire (Duke University Press, 2024)—a groundbreaking book that reveals how U.S. courts have quietly become instruments of global economic governance. Drawing on legal geography and a sharp understanding of finance and political economy, Shaina uncovers how American judicial authority has extended beyond borders to discipline postcolonial states, enforce the primacy of private property, and protect the rights of foreign investors. This legal reach—what she calls judicial territory—has been a crucial, yet overlooked, pillar of U.S. empire and the liberal international order.

The conversation unpacks how doctrines like foreign sovereign immunity and the act of state doctrine have enabled courts in New York and elsewhere to shape global capital flows, often treating foreign governments like private firms. Through detailed case studies—such as a startling instance where a U.S. court orders Ghana to seize an Argentine ship—we trace the long arc of legal imperialism from the Cold War through today’s multipolar tensions. We also ask: Could China or Russia create alternative legal geographies of power? What does the future hold for judicial authority in fields like tech regulation, climate, and global finance?

GUEST BIO: Dr. Shaina Potts is an economic, legal, and political geographer and Associate Professor at UCLA. She focuses on the articulation of international political economy, geopolitics, and law. In the age of globalization, cross-border economic processes are often treated as placeless, ubiquitous flows, making nation-states and borders increasingly obsolete. Her work shows, in contrast, how transnational economic relations are inscribed in concrete and geographically specific legal and institutional practices and that states remain central to producing and governing this activity. Much of her research combines analyses of technical, economic, and legal processes with extensive historical and geopolitical contextualization to show how the perpetuation of North-South economic inequalities is shaped by the micro-operations of contracts, financial transactions, and law. A strand of her research focuses on financial geographies of sovereign debt, with a focus on debt crises in the Global South.

More on Shaina and research is available here: https://geog.ucla.edu/person/shaina-potts/

LINKS TO RESOURCES:

Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire: https://dukeupress.edu/judicial-territory
Long-form essay on Shaina Potts' Judicial Territory by Ilias Alami: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X251342660
The Spectre of State Capitalism by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon: https://academic.oup.com/book/57552

Corporate Sovereignty Law and Government under Capitalism by Joshua Barkan - https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816674275/corporate-sovereignty/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory