Empires of Law: Discipline and Resistance within the Transnational System

Abstract

This article explores the idea that law has become newly constitutive in a postmodern transnational system in which modernity's classic polarities have become obscured, the discipline of late capitalism has become widely if partially internalized outside of institutional domains, liberalism's foot soldiers (rights, citizenship, nation statism, 'free' markets) have gained new forward momentum despite a period of supposed ideological hybridity described by that overheated but ill-theorized concept 'globalization', and, finally, most arguments for socialist/egalitarian revolution or system transformation must now be seen as anachronisms. The article locates these processes as essential features of a particular disciplinary regime in which the grandeur of liberal legality is used to create loyalty to the wider project of liberalism within the consolidation of late capitalism. These regimes are called 'empires of law', and the theoretical framework within which empires of law are rendered intelligible as actual sociolegal phenomena draws from, but critically reframes, insights found in Hardt and Negri's book Empire (2000).

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