Journal of Law and Political Economy

Small jurisdictions that are globally competitive in providing cross-border financial services—market-dominant small jurisdictions (MDSJs)—occupy fascinating and unique positions in global markets, reflecting the complexity of their linkages with major economies. This article explores how the distinctive features of MDSJs highlight important dimensions of the relationship between national identity and economic development. I review literatures that aim to explain how jurisdictions behave in the economic context, focusing on concepts of nationalism, national identity, and nation branding, and how such phenomena might impact one another. I then assess their application to the relationship between national identity and economic development in MDSJs, where realities of size and geography prompt substantial outward orientation and incentivize innovations in law and finance to service economic activity largely occurring elsewhere. The article culminates with a vivid case study—the role of national identity in developing, marketing, and maintaining Bermuda’s outsized role in global insurance markets.

This article develops a radical legal critique of algorithmic management with a view to providing strategic guidance to radicals seeking to navigate the problems caused by algorithmic management in a way that contributes to their wider, radical, political objectives. Contributing to a “radical” tradition in legal scholarship, the article’s approach is distinctive for evaluating the merits and demerits of algorithmic management by reference to its impact on the conditions for radical political struggle, and for taking seriously the implications of the law’s structural relationship with the capitalist system when it comes to whether, and if so, how, law might be mobilized in ways that can meaningfully remedy these effects or improve these conditions more generally.

The connection between neoliberalism and human rights, which both took flight in the 1970s and 1980s, has garnered significant scholarly attention. Interestingly, from the 1970s onward, there have also been important turning points in the history of refugee protection that have fostered a minimalist approach to refugee protection. Given neoliberalism’s significant influence on the contemporary understanding of human rights, the question arises whether this neoliberal understanding of human rights also extends to refugee rights and refugee protection. This article argues that the minimalist approach to refugee protection presupposes a specific understanding of the rights of refugees that combines with a neoliberal understanding of human rights in general. Refugees are no longer perceived to have rights, but to have needs. Like human rights in general, refugee rights were reshaped according to the idea that saving bare lives and provision of basic needs is deemed sufficient.

In this article, we return to the scene of the police call in the United States to conceptualize the basic needs and structural forces animating calls for service and their relationship to a jurispathic form of legal violence. We do so by revisiting the perennial question of why people call the police, analyzing how conditions of organized abandonment drive the call. We follow how police reports reveal the bureaucratic and administrative legal violence of policing itself, extending police logics and power into all social problems/response, obstructing the political capacity to imagine—and demand—the most basic of nonpunitive life-supporting infrastructure. Against this dominance, many are searching for more direct and meaningful ways to respond to crisis, making the police call a contested site for municipal politics and community resources through jurisgenerative abolitionist-like practices grounded in the empirical conditions of ordinary people’s lives.