The International Conference of American Republics has assumed a well-defined and dignified position among the great international organizations of the world. Four conferences have met up to the present time. The suspicions and misrepresentations by which the first of these meetings were surrounded, while still occasionally cropping up in the press and among persons who are not entirely well informed, are no longer of any effect among serious publicists. As the general character of the International Union becomes more and more established, many matters that originally led to heated discussion may now be taken for granted and left to a purely academic forum.

Alan Sykes’ editorial comment, Economic “Necessity” in International Law, provides a multi-layered analysis of the defense of “necessity” in international investment disputes. Sykes’ main proposition is that the obligation to compensate investors for government measures prejudicing their investments during economic emergencies mitigates the risk of moral hazard and incentivizes States to “select the least expensive way to protect their interests (the optimal policy instrument).” Otherwise, he contends, “actors will take risks that imperil them to an excessive degree if they can save themselves by imposing costs on others.” Sykes nonetheless argues that payment of the compensation could be deferred in light of the emergency, and not be subject to market interest rates.

Heraclitus's words remind us that law and infrastructure have lived in intimate relation, in practice and thought, for millennia. This intimacy is palpable in the context of settler worldmaking where colonial jurisdiction is enacted by constraining, with an eye to replacing, Indigenous jurisdiction. Here, the authority to have authority is often asserted in practice through violent attempts to control connectivity and movement. To this day, imperial powers assert jurisdiction over space through infrastructures that enhance or inhibit the motion of goods and people, like railroads, pipelines, border walls, and police.2 This Essay investigates the co-production of colonial law and infrastructure on Turtle Island—an Indigenous name for the continent of North America, which already highlights a different conception of jurisdiction and law through its anchor in creation stories. The brief sketches that follow emphasize the co-constitution of law and infrastructure, yet they also propose a relationship that exceeds proximity or metaphor. Law operates through the ordering of extension, and in this sense, can productively be thought of infrastructurally, as “the movement or patterning of social form.”3 This Essay argues that approaching law infrastructurally foregrounds the contingency of seemingly solid structures, including centrally that of settler jurisdiction.