Courts AND local governments can’t solve colonialism – prior precedent means that it’s impossible. Only Congress solves.
Ciolli and Hrelic 22 (Anthony and Dana; Ciolli is a past President of the Virgin Islands Bar Association. He currently serves as Senior Law Clerk and Special Assistant to the Chief Justice of the Virgin Islands. He remains active in both the Virgin Islands Bar Association as well as the American Bar Association, where he serves as one of the Virgin Islands delegates to the ABA House of Delegates. He also serves on the Executive Council of the National Conference of Bar Presidents. Dana M. Hrelic has earned a reputation as an accomplished appellate and commercial litigation attorney. She has substantial experience in state, territorial, and federal appeals in the areas of constitutional law, complex litigation and business law, family law, juvenile law, personal injury, administrative law, civil procedure, probate law, and criminal law. She has represented clients before the Connecticut Appellate and Supreme Courts as well as the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Supreme Court of the U.S. Virgin Islands. She also has experience working on appellate matters in the Eleventh Circuit. She has argued or sat as second chair in countless more appeals in these courts. Dana has also represented amicus curiae clients, including the American Association of Justice and the Virgin Islands Bar Association, in the United States Supreme Court. In her trial litigation practice, Dana has consulted with trial counsel and clients on civil, family, juvenile, criminal, and complex litigation matters and provides assistance at all stages of litigation, including both pre- and post-judgment matters—especially in matters where there is a likelihood of appeal. Dana is an active member of numerous professional organizations and has held leadership roles in the Connecticut Bar Association, the American Counsel Association, and the American Bar Association, including serving in the ABA House of Delegates, serving as the Second Circuit Member of the ABA Federal Judiciary Committee, and serving as Chair of the ABA Young Lawyers Division. She is an active writer and co-authored three books, including the Connecticut Practice Book Annotated, Connecticut Juvenile Law and A Practical Guide to Evidence in Connecticut, authoring the chapter on reputation evidence. Dana routinely presents on appellate practice and procedure, diversity in the profession, legal education, and innovation in the profession, “Third-Class Citizens: Unequal Protection Within United States Territories,” Suffolk University Law Review, Vol. 55, Issue 2, ebscohost) //pa-amad
Imagine living in a community within the United States where the local government only permits people of the majority race to own land. Those who are not members of the majority race may vote in most elections, but county councils, in accordance with the customs of the majority race, elect the upper house of the bicameral legislature; furthermore, only the heads of families of the majority race--who fulfill their obligations as those customs require--may hold office. While outsiders perceive the community as welcoming and friendly, the view from within differs: The local government has enacted laws mandating preferential hiring for members of the majority race, making it more difficult for "outsiders" to enter certain licensed professions and turning a blind eye to factories staffed by hundreds of de facto slaves of minority races subject to corporal punishment. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has issued decisions holding many of these practices unconstitutional, the local government has publicly asserted that it will not follow those decisions because they are inconsistent with local culture. The above is not a historical description of life in the Jim Crow South. Rather, it represents the current situation in American Samoa, a U.S. territory. Judges and scholars routinely describe the people of American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as second-class citizens within the United States. (1) At the turn of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court of the United States caused this characterization in the Insular Cases when it established them as "a sub-class of United States citizens, unequal in rights to the rest of the body politic" residing in "what amounts to a political ghetto" based on the premise that "the United States could hold territories and their inhabitants in a colonial status ad infinitum." (2) It should come as no surprise that contemporary legal scholarship portrays the territories as "systematically forgotten and mistreated" and highlights the federal government's perpetuation of economic, political, and other disparities on them. (3) What has drawn virtually no attention, however, is the discrimination that territorial governments have perpetuated--and in some cases continue to perpetuate--against their own citizens based on gender, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, and other immutable characteristics. (4) While territorial governments and their allies frequently urge the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn the Insular Cases in high-profile cases involving their relationship with the federal government, these same territorial governments often embrace the Insular Cases in the lower federal courts and use them as a shield to prevent judicial scrutiny of local legislation or other practices. (5) In doing so, the oppressed become the oppressors and use the tools of their own oppression to establish a subclass within their own subclass--in effect, third-class citizens.