It’s time: Genevieve Renard Painter, ‘As If a Foreign Country: Evidence Law and Settler Colonial Sovereignty’, in Paolo Amorosa, Ville Erkkilä, Karolina Stenlund (eds), Times of Global Injustice, Routledge, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

It’s time: Genevieve Renard Painter, ‘As If a Foreign Country: Evidence Law and Settler Colonial Sovereignty’, in Paolo Amorosa, Ville Erkkilä, Karolina Stenlund (eds), Times of Global Injustice, Routledge, 2026

20Mar26

Abstract: The hallmark of sovereignty is not only effective control over space, but effective control over time. In settler colonial states, time is the vector through which the state defends its perpetual existence against the inconvenient fact of pre-colonial and continuing Indigenous presence. Adjudication in common law systems is a powerful mechanism for defending settler sovereignty because of the rules that bind facts to law. Evidence rules determine how adjudicators come to know the past and stipulate some of the past as knowable. Whether through eyewitness, documentary, or expert evidence, evidence rules make the past “present” in the present, without interpretation or mediation. Through legal technique, the legal process produces temporal sovereignty. First, the action of writing history in judgment presumes and reifies the state’s continuity through time. This reaffirms the settler state’s perpetually contested sovereignty. Second, history written into judgments creates pasts from which the state’s jurisdiction is imagined to flow. Thus are codified foundational myths about state domination over Indigenous life. Third, the mechanics of citation and precedent cause a judicially-legitimated past to repeat as fact. Writing in a present challenged by rival Indigenous legalities, the judge is bonded by legal techniques into writing histories that are declared to correspond to the past and that iterate into the future. Telling stories through law is how the state occupies time.

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