Jurisdiction and nation-building: tall tales in nineteenth-century Aotearoa/New Zealand

Que.stions of jurisdiction involve the determination of the boundaries of the law. Notions of modern territorial jurisdiction emerged with the development of the modern natioin-state as the bounded territory in which a particular set of laws applIed. These modern notions of both nation-state and jurisdiction facilitated colonisation by determining the territorial boundaries in which colonial law applied, by determing the national space to other nations, and by producing difference within national and jurisdictional boundaries. The production of internal difference, the creation of differences between distinct groupings through the law\u27s jurisdictional speech, is arguably the most important work that jurisdiction performs (Ford, 1999: 908)