ABSTRACT
This chapter examines law’s work within financial crisis governance – how it grounds financial practices as authoritative, as well as the socially-formative work performed by that authority. Focusing on class-action litigation by homeowners against the US mortgage giant Countrywide Financial, I argue that temporality is a key analytic for understanding the regulatory force of law relative to claims of fraudulent lender behavior. Specifically, I focus on how “technologies of jurisdiction” construct a time-space within court adjudication that mobilizes historic legal imaginaries (such as the appropriate “powers” of national banks, or limits to the construction of collective claims regarding financial exploitation) to secure the validity of creditors’ exploitative claims against borrowers’ future incomes. Further, attention to how adjudication grounds law’s authority by admitting certain social facts and denying others – a threshold of admission between law and non-law – helps us understand the social and spatial logics of selection at work in the crisis.
