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This article marks the twentieth anniversary of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory or the LatCrit organization, an association of diverse scholars committed to the production of knowledge from the perspective of Outsider or OutCrit jurisprudence. The article first reflects on the historical development of LatCrit's substantive, methodological, and institutional commitments and practices. It argues that these traditions were shaped not only by its members' goals and commitments but also by the politics of backlash present at its birth in the form of the "cultural wars," and which have since morphed into perpetual "crises" grounded in neoliberal policies. With this background, the article turns to the current foundations for the future intergenerational transmission of the LatCrit mission and outlines a number of potential future challenges. It concludes with a description of the symposium essays written primarily by a new generation of LatCrit scholars, both the potential inheritors and creators of current and future substantive, methodological and institutional LatCrit practices.

Over the last three decades, neoliberal restructuring of the economy created a symbiosis of debt and discipline. New legal regimes and strategic use of monetary policy displaced Keynesian welfare, facilitated financialization of the economy, broke the power of organized labor, and expanded debt to sustain aggregate demand. Public laws and policies created a field of possibility within which financial markets extended their reach and brought ever-increasing sections of the working classes and the marginalized within the ambit of the credit economy. Reordered public policies and new norms of personal responsibility demarcated the horizon within which the economically vulnerable pursued strategies of economic survival and security. Neoliberalism deployed refashioned concepts of individual responsibility and human capital to facilitate assemblage of subjects who would engage the financialized economy as risk-taking entrepreneurs. Faced with restructured labor markets, wage pressures, and shrinking welfare, working classes found themselves with little choice but to pay for their basic needs through debt. Engulfment in debt, in turn, induced self-discipline and conformity with the logic of the financialized economy and precarious labor markets. This ensemble sutured debt with discipline.

Many of today's pervasive and intractable security and nation-building dilemmas issue from the dissonance between the prescribed model of territorially bounded nation-states and the imprisonment of postcolonial polities in territorial straitjackets bequeathed by colonial cartographies. With a focus on the Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the epicenter of the prolonged war in the region, this article explores the enduring ramifications of the mutually constitutive role of colonialism and modern law. The global reach of colonial rule reordered subjects and reconfigured space. Fixed territorial demarcations of colonial possessions played a pivotal role in this process. Nineteenth century constructs of international law, geography, geopolitics, and the frontier, fashioned in the age of empire, were interwoven in the enabling frame that made the drawing of colonial borders like the Durand Line possible. Imperatives of colonial rule and compulsions of imperial rivalries positioned these demarcations that often cut across age-old cultural and historical social units. Postcolonial states inherited these demarcations and, with them, a host of endemic political and security afflictions. Modern international law, which in its incipient state lent license to colonial rule, today legitimates colonial cartographies, thereby accentuating postcolonial dilemmas of nation-building and territorial integrity. By freeze-framing inherited colonial borders, international law forces disparate people to circumscribe their political aspirations within predetermined territorial bounds, precluding political and territorial arrangements in tune with their aspirations. To silence the questions that rise from colonial territorial demarcations, international law raises the specter of disorder. It seeks to preserve order, even an unjust and dysfunctional one. In the process, international law betrays a deeper affliction that plagues it - its refusal to squarely face its complicity in colonial domination accentuates ...

This article examines the relationship between law and geography through the prisms of colonialism and neoliberal Empire. Using two novels set in nineteenth and twenty-first century India, respectively, it evaluates the so-called first law of geography, namely that "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." It argues that the formative and enduring relationship between global systems of domination and modern law has created a geolegal space that has a global dimension. This geolegal space creates norms and subjectivities that are intimately related to spatially distant forces and projects. Emergence and consolidation of capitalism created a global geo-economic space where law and geography were brought together, creating an intimate relationship between the global and the local. Accumulation by dispossession, an enduring feature of capitalism, renders this global relationship one of domination and exploitation. While colonial and post-colonial phases of global capitalism deployed different regimes of political and economic governance, they function within the same grammar of modern law that facilitates domination and exploitation in the service of capital accumulation by dispossession.

This article argues that the discourse of viability of civil society in postcolonial polities is theoretically ungrounded, and helps to further marginalize subordinated sections of these societies. These failings result from the imprisonment of dominant social theories in Eurocentric unilinear evolutionism, an imprisonment that blinds one from the particularities of supposedly universal categories that issue from Europe's experience of modernity. Furthermore, enthusiasm for civil society ignores the truncated colonial career of modernity and the nature of the postcolonial state. In order to substantiate these propositions, the paper traces the genealogy of the concept of civil society, examines the colonial career of modernity, and analyses the nature of the postcolonial state using Pakistan as an example.