"The legal form of the sovereign nation-state and the concepts of contract and private property, as well as their many permutations, have spread across the world during centuries of European imperial dominance. They are neither weak nor manipulable at will. On the contrary, they form a ubiquitous and immensely powerful aspect of the way we are all ruled.
This legal infrastructure remains invulnerable to the standard critique of international law. It consists of many different kinds of law—international and domestic, private and public, formal and informal—that collaborate to reproduce the banal reality of an unjust world outside the spectacle of war and sovereign conflict. Consolidated in the context of state-building, commercial expansion and the ideologies of civilization, modernization and development, they do not form a logical system, nor are they the expression of a single plan. Yet since the 1980s, these laws have operated as largely taken-for-granted aspects of ‘global governance’, enabling powerful actors to make claims about legal rights, powers and privileges to which others have been expected to yield. Globalization has been an intensely legalistic affair. From the organization of government to the most technical rules of consumer protection, from claims of jurisdiction made by states against each other to the rights of identity, contract and property invoked by individuals and corporations, our social lives are framed and pervaded by law. Far from being an infinitely flexible façade, law governs the way we imagine our social relations, and thus defines the character of those relations. Nothing of importance can be accomplished without making claims about legal right, power and privilege."
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii154/articles/the-laws-that-rule-us