ABSTRACT

The law constitutes our societies in many ways. Broadly speaking, it articulates core purposes, including material purposes, and defines the means to achieve these purposes.1 Neoliberal legality can be understood as the laws that articulate the purposes of wealth maximisation and internal social order, and more importantly, that provide only certain means to achieve these goals. These means are legal techniques based on the bilateralisation of relations and microeconomic rationality, two core disciplines of a neoliberal governmentality.2 Given that the idea of governmentality is tightly related to the control and use of resources, any legal account of a neoliberal governmentality also needs to consider the particular legal techniques that actors use to control resources. The objective of this contribution is to explore the proprietary and contractual techniques that serve to allocate control over resources in the context of neoliberal legality, using foreign investment relations as a case study. This chapter seeks to examine how the dominant legal techniques make possible ‘the impossibility of the existence of an economic sovereign’.3