Chicanx-Latinx Law Review

Despite widespread pressure, the Supreme Court has not overruled the Insular Cases, a set of cases the Court decided between 1901-1922 which are infamous for their racist rhetoric and their determination that the Constitution should not apply in full to all Americans. Serving as part and parcel of the Anglo-Saxon colonialist project, these cases helped generate a conception of American “belonging” that excludes non-white or non-English-speaking individuals. Today, this legacy manifests through discriminatory border protection policies and perpetuations of an English linguistic supremacy, both which serve to denigrate Latine individuals and which leave them with more tenuous access to justice. While overruling the Insular Cases is long overdue, the ethno-racialized system of exclusion that they perpetuated is so deeply entrenched into our society that departing from the cases’ deplorable legal precedents today would not suffice to prove that the country has abandoned their divisive norms.