Jose Atiles

I am interested in how the law, legal institutions, and governance regimes shape colonial orders, global finance, corporate organization, and environmental governance. Across these areas, I examine how law structures relations of power, enables systems of extraction, and conditions the possibilities for resistance, accountability, and democratic transformation.

Puerto Rico serves as a central empirical site through which I investigate broader questions about law, empire, and global capitalism. My book, Crisis by Design: Emergency Powers and Colonial Legality in Puerto Rico(Stanford University Press, 2024), examines how emergency powers have become normalized as techniques of colonial governance and explores their implications for democracy, justice, and post-disaster recovery. Crisis by Design asks how Puerto Ricans access a just recovery amid simultaneous crises and the continuous use and renewal of state of emergency declarations in response to these crises.

My book Islands of Exception: Law, Empire, and Offshore Finance in the Caribbean (Cambridge University Press, 2026) extends this research agenda by examining how offshore financial centers function as legal formations of empire and global capitalism. Through a sociolegal analysis of offshore finance, tax havens, and secrecy jurisdictions, the book explores how colonial legal institutions continue to shape contemporary financial governance, corporate power, and global financial networks.

Building on this work, my next book project, The Global Colony: Law and Offshore Finance in Puerto Rico (in progress), examines Puerto Rico's transformation into an offshore finance center. The project investigates how colonial legal institutions, financial regulation, and tax policy have repositioned the archipelago within the global political economy, illuminating the changing relationship between law, empire, offshore finance, and contemporary forms of capital accumulation.

Methodologically, my research combines ethnography, historical and archival research, case studies, and sociolegal institutional analysis to examine how legal institutions shape contemporary forms of governance and political-economic power.