Law as Infrastructure of Colonial Space: Sketches from Turtle Island
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it