From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

Puerto Rico has been in the news a lot in the last few years, but often missing from the headlines about hurricanes and political scandals is critical context about the island's legal status.

Puerto Rico is what's called an unincorporated U.S. territory. It's controlled by the U.S. government, yet its residents don't enjoy the full protections of the Constitution.

That's in part because of a series of century-old Supreme Court decisions called the insular cases.

Recently, the ACLU asked the Supreme Court to overrule those decisions. As the ACLU writes in

its brief, the insular cases, quote, rest on outmoded and pernicious racist assumptions that are

plainly unacceptable today. Here to discuss how America came to legalize the second-class

status of Puerto Rico is Adriel Sepeda-Derex, a staff attorney with the ACLU's Voting Rights

Project. Thanks very much for joining us, Adriel. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Emerson. Thanks for

having me today.

The Supreme Court is hearing a case on October 15th about Puerto Rico's financial oversight board that was created by Congress to respond to the island's financial crisis. But our brief

really deals with some of the deeper issues about Puerto Rico's legal status vis-a-vis the

United States.

By way of introduction, can you orient us a bit?

What is the legal and constitutional status of Puerto Rico?

And how is it different from the 50 states and other territories?

Sure.

So Puerto Rico is what's known from the insular cases as an unincorporated territory. And the insular cases are this series of decisions the Supreme Court

issued at the beginning of the 20th century. Puerto Rico's not a state. It's a territory. And the United

States has never just been states. It's always had territories. But for the first 120 years of the

country, as the United States expanded West into that territory, the understanding

...