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INTRODUCTION 1264 I. WHY THE INSULAR CASES STILL MATTER 1268 II. THE RELUCTANCE TO REVISIT THE INSULAR CASES 1271 III. GETTING THE TERRITORIAL CLAUSE RIGHT 1279 A. The Plain Text [...]

Table of Contents Introduction I. Puerto Rico's History as a U.S. Colony Populated by U.S. Citizens A. Puerto Rico Becomes a U.S. Colony B. The Emergence and Consequences of Commonwealth [...], Puerto Rico is an uncomfortable reminder of the democratic deficits within the world's oldest constitutional democracy. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens who live in a U.S. territory that is subject to the plenary authority of Congress, to which they cannot elect voting members. In 2022, under unified Democratic control for the first time in a decade, Congress considered the Puerto Rico Status Act, legislation that would finally decolonize Puerto Rico. The Status Act offered Puerto Rican voters three alternatives to the colonial status quo--statehood, independence, or sovereignty in free association--and committed Congress to implementing whichever alternative won majority support from Puerto Rican voters. The Status Act sought to define how any change in status would affect Puerto Ricans' access to U.S. citizenship. The Status Act proposed that all Puerto Ricans would retain their U.S. citizenship if Puerto Rico became independent or entered free association but included special restrictions that would limit Puerto Ricans' ability to pass on their U.S. citizenship to children born after a change in status. While this Note appreciates the Status Act's efforts to decolonize Puerto Rico, it argues that the Status Act erred in proposing this specialized regime for citizenship claims. Instead, it contends that the existing derivative citizenship framework would better regulate citizenship for Puerto Rican U.S. citizens born after a change in status. Although the Status Act died in the Senate, it represents a new and influential formula for decolonizing Puerto Rico. Future proponents of status reform should draw on the existing derivative citizenship law because it offers clearer provisions that can better ensure a large number of Puerto Ricans may rely on U.S. citizenship--a benefit Puerto Ricans themselves clearly value--even after a change in status.

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 655 I. CITIZENSHIP ACQUISITION AND LOSS IN THE UNITED STATES 660 A. Acquisition of U.S. Citizenship 660 1. Birthright Citizenship (Jus Soli) 661 2. Citizenship by [...], The United States has granted reparations for a variety of historical injustices, from imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Yet the nation has never considered reparations for 150 years of discriminatory immigration and citizenship policies that excluded millions based on race, gender, and political opinion--including some who are alive today. This Article argues that the United States can atone for these transgressions by granting "reparative citizenship" to those individuals and their descendants, following the lead of several European countries who have recently provided such relief for those wrongly expelled or excluded in the past. Reparative citizenship could take many different forms. The executive branch could unilaterally implement a narrow version of reparative citizenship by instructing immigration officials to loosen evidentiary standards and grant discretionary remedies to victims of discriminatory policies. A more expansive version would require amending the Immigration and Nationality Act to re-allocate to historically excluded groups the 50,000 green cards currently given out through a lottery system. Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, and Spain have adopted similar approaches in granting citizenship to the descendants of Jewish citizens expelled in the past, as well as to individuals denied citizenship based on gender or political opinion. The United States should do the same.

I. Introduction II. Background A. What Is Asylum Generally 1. Well-Founded Fear of Persecution 2. Persecution Must Be Based on Race, Nationality, Religion, Political Opinion, or Membership of a Particular [...], As of 2022, nearly two million asylum-seekers are sitting in limbo, awaiting the scheduling of their asylum interviews. The wait has only been getting longer, due in part to the "last in, first out" policy (LIFO) implemented by the Trump Administration in 2018. In practice, LIFO has exacerbated the wait times for asylum-seekers by pushing waiting applicants with completed applications farther back in line and prioritizing new applicants who have less time to prepare their cases. This Note analyzes the causes for the sharp rise in pending asylum applications as well as LIFO's harmful effects on immigrants stemming from its prioritization of affirmative asylum interviews during the first 21 days after asylum-seekers submit their applications. This Note argues that LIFO is the incorrect response to reduce the immigration backlog; instead, the government should assign some immigration officials to work in reverse order to give closure to waiting applicants, implement a five year "cutoff period" where applications are reprioritized after sitting for five years, hire more immigration officials to sift through the backlog, and guarantee the right to free or low-cost counsel to parties in immigration cases.

I. INTRODUCTION 345 II. ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE 347 TECHNOLOGIES: A BRIEF OVERVIEW A. PROCEDURES EMPLOYED 347 IN ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES B. POTENTIAL RISKS TO OFFSPRING 348 C. ATTEMPTS TO CREATE A [...]

INTRODUCTION: Personal status is an example of legal pluralism in Egypt, where several laws are enforced by several judicial bodies, all with the goal of regulating the personal status of [...]

It is originalist gospel that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause was intended, at a minimum, to incorporate the Bill of Rights against the states. This Article revisits forty [...]

I. INTRODUCTION 132 II. DEFINING THE SINKING STATE 135 III. THE CASCADING CONSEQUENCES OF SINKING STATES 140 A. Redefining Statehood 146 B. Undermining Sovereign Equality of States 154 C. Humanitarian [...], Sea level rise due to climate change and the impacts of this rise on small island states are some of the most pressing emerging issues in international law. This article examines the phenomenon of sinking states--low-lying island states at risk of the submergence of the entirety of their territory due to sea level rise. The existence of sinking states raises complex and profound questions related to statehood, nationality, and human rights, to which international law currently provides no sufficient answer. This Article addresses the cascading consequences of sinking states. It evaluates proposals for addressing the phenomenon and analyzes the future implications of these potential solutions. The cascading consequences of sinking states include undermining the principles of the sovereign equality of states and the right to self-determination, redefining statehood in a manner that may unjustly exclude other similarly situated nations and peoples, exacerbating humanitarian crises related to climate change, and undermining the international legal order. This Article is the first to examine what sinking states and the cascading consequences of their existence reveal about cracks in the foundation of international law. Specifically, sinking states reveal weaknesses in the state-centric model of international law and exemplify the peril of a retreat from the progressive development of a more just legal framework Sinking states serve as a metaphor for international law and the whole of humanity. If we fail to meet the urgency of the moment with a radical new vision for our collective security, we risk our own potential demise.

INTRODUCTION 1826 I. THE HISTORY OF THE COLONIAL UNITED STATES--PUERTO RICO RELATIONSHIP 1831 A. First Round of Experiments (1900-1917): Foraker Act and the Insular Cases 1834 B. Round Two of [...], In 1901, Puerto Rico was deemed to be an unincorporated territory of the United States by the Supreme Court in Dowries v. Bidwell. This opinion unleashed Congress' ability to treat American citizens in Puerto Rico as second-class citizens, legally allowing Congress to apply only certain parts of the U.S. Constitution to Puerto Ricans. Through its plenary authority and the backing of Supreme Court opinions throughout the years, Congress has successfully choked Puerto Rico's autonomy while boasting that its "compact" with the island allows it to rule itself. However, this cloak, fomented by the Commonwealth status, has proven to be nothing more than the same colonial unincorporated status that the Supreme Court had articulated in the decisions that followed Dowries, collectively known as the Insular Cases, which determined the constitutional status of the colonies acquired from Spain after the Spanish--American War. In recent history, Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle showed that the Supreme Court will not allow Puerto Rico to be considered as a sovereign for certain purposes, and the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) has demonstrated that Congress has the power to overrule any strand of local authority that the government of Puerto Rico allegedly holds. Most recently, in United States v. Vaello Madero, the Supreme Court ruled that treating Puerto Ricans differently due to their residence on the island was enough to surpass a rational basis test and allow for differential treatment of Puerto Ricans. Therefore, as this Comment demonstrates, Congress must act to end Puerto Rico's unincorporated status and Puerto Ricans' century-long disenfranchisement by creating both a robust law that allows Puerto Rico to choose its own future and a congressional committee focused on implementing this law.

NATIONS The Western nation knows human only as its citizen (Kalu, 2017). It decides who can be a citizen and is able to access the human rights it affords to [...]

The common law rejects 'Aboriginal sovereignty' as being inconsistent with Crown sovereignty. Yet the common law defines Aboriginal sovereignty' as a single, homogenous sovereignty adverse to the Crown. The position [...]

Table of Contents I. Introduction 537 II. Cook's Benefits Rationale and Its Alternatives: An Overview 538 III. Examining the Rationales 542 A. Allegiance Rationale 543 1. Outmoded 543 2. Rejected [...], There exist multiple rationales for the U.S. extraterritorial tax system. The rationales seek to explain why overseas Americans should be subject to worldwide taxation by the United States. This paper challenges those rationales: The allegiance rationale is outmoded and has been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court; the benefits rationale has been discredited; the membership in U.S. society rationale is belied by the exclusion of overseas Americans from critical beneficial aspects of the U.S. economy, the U.S. tax system, and federal assistance; the "worth the tax cost" rationale disregards human rights and the realities of renunciation of U.S. citizenship; and the administrability rationale ignores that the administration of an extraterritorial tax system requires resources beyond those required to determine domicile--resources the Internal Revenue Service does not have. Ultimately, all the rationales are theoretical. They do not confront the reality of the actual extraterritorial tax system in place today. They do not contend with the full scope and complexity of the actual system, or the system's multitude of intractable problems and injustices.

I. OVERVIEW II. BACKGROUND A. The Immigration and Nationality Act B. Constitutional Avoidance III. Court's Decision IV. Analysis I. OVERVIEW If you are married in the United States, you are [...]