Rule of Innocents:
White Settler Sentiment and the Supreme Court

Liza Minno in conversation with Lou Cornum

We are please to welcome Liza Minno to celebrate the publication of her first book, in a conversation with Lou Cornum

Through a close reading of three contemporary Supreme Court cases, Rule of Innocents reckons with the materiality of white settler sentiments and asks how law is used to regulate the emotional life of the settler state. How do white settlers’ feelings of innocence, virtue, at-homeness, and victimization vis à vis Native people and tribal sovereignty get codified into law? And why is the Supreme Court a unique vehicle for that codification?

Dylan Rodríguez writes, “Surging from a stream of radical, anticolonialist and liberationsist thought, Rule of Innocents exposes how the settler world’s cultivated ‘feelings’ construct a theater of ongoing colonial warfare. What happens when white settler sentiment becomes codified as Empire’s law? Liza Minno has created an indespensible analytic toolbox for rescripting and retheorizing the long colonial lexicons of citizenship, individual rights, constitutional law, and sovereignty. This book deprovincializes the U.S. Supreme Court, Federal Indian poicy, and settler-defined tribal sovereignty, exposing how they construct a wretched totality cohered through the aggressive fragility of white colonial identities.”

Liza Minno is an organizer, educator, and nonfiction writer. She is a doctoral student in New York University’s American Studies program. She is based in Brooklyn and New Jersey. This is her first book.

Lou Cornum is a writer, editor, and academic born in Arizona and based in New York City. Their work traverses Native American Studies, science fiction, cultural studies, and gay communism. They are currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and part of Pinko magazine. Recent writing can be found in the collection Mommy Wound and at Social Text Online.