Journal of Law and Political Economy

International legal and financial organizations have recently been proposing that the acquisition of lithium and other critical minerals should be mediated through particular kinds of supply chain policy. In this article, I examine the legal practices that have shaped lithium extraction, and the modes of legal thought on the relationship between the nation-state and the corporation that have influenced how international lawyers often understand this intensifying extraction. I suggest that what we now call the lithium supply chain could be understood as an accretion of practices of international legal ordering, very often in a hierarchical manner. In my analysis, these historical practices of legal ordering can shed light on international institutions’ current focus on critical mineral supply chains, where demands for reparation or reorganization of the global economy often become sidelined through the promise of the energy transition: that more lithium is all we need.