The Reframing of Law’s Imperial Frame: An Analysis of Jim Tully’s Theory of Post-Colonial Empire

Abstract

This paper provides a constructive critique of Jim Tully's innovative body of work on the juridical nature of 'empire' in its contemporary post-colonial phase. Tully's work emphasizes the high degree of continuity between the legal articulation of classical imperial power relations and the contemporary settlement, even though that settlement is mediated through a much more developed and notionally egalitarian framework of international and transnational law. The present author accepts much of Tully's critique, but urges that space must be retained within any explanatory scheme for the reconstitutive and transformative potential of law, even if that law cannot be hermetically sealed off from its imperial legacy