Happy February, listeners, and welcome to season ten of Digging a Hole! When we started the pod five years ago, we had our eyes on the Grammys, or maybe the Emmys, whatever award show we could finagle our way into. Turns out we have bigger fish to fry than whether or not we’re more deserving of an award than Call Her Daddy — Greenland, anyone? We’re thrilled to be kicking off this season with someone who knows a great deal about United States Empire: Allison Powers Useche, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of the new book, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law.

Powers Useche kicks us off with a discussion of the use of the arbitration forum as a place to hear what we now think of as international public law claims, including challenges to racial violence and Jim Crow. We dive into some case studies about how ordinary people across the Americas fought the United States in arbitration and offer competing interpretations about how to think about what happened from a legal realist perspective. Finally, we get Powers Useche’s take on how environmentalists, Indigenous groups, and others are using the tools of private economic law to contest empire today. 

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

• Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 by Arnulf Becker Lorca

• The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas: Empire and Legal Networks by Juan Pablo Scarfi

• Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century by Benjamin Allen Coates

• The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez