The NMI Council for the Humanities is inviting the public to a lecture titled “Article 12, Claims to Culture and Political Rights: the Race vs. Political Identity Dilemma” at the American Memorial Park Visitors Center Theater on Tuesday, July 7, at 6pm.
In her lecture, visiting law professor Rose Cuison Villazor will discuss the legal, historical and cultural relationships between Article 12 and other “blood quantum property laws” in American Samoa, Hawaii and other jurisdictions and situate them in constitutional jurisprudence.
The lecture is based in part on an article that Villazor published in the California Law Review and explains the ways in which blood quantum laws are examined under contemporary equal protection doctrine. In particular, Villazor will discuss the U.S. Supreme Court's approach to analyzing blood quantum laws under either a race or political constitutional paradigm.
This binary framework, she contends, fails to address competing yet equally important issues of equality, liberty and political rights that relate to land ownership in formerly colonized territories. Accordingly, she will consider whether an examination of Article 12 under due process analysis would better attend to various conflicting claims in post-colonial territories.
Villazor, a former Saipan resident and 1991 graduate of Mt. Carmel High School, is an associate professor of Law at Hofstra University Law School. She received her J.D. from the American University Washington College of Law and her LL.M. from the Columbia University School of Law.
The lecture is a part of the NMI Council for the Humanities continuing efforts to provide the community with information on Article 12 of the CNMI's Constitution from a variety of viewpoints. Additional information about the lecture may be obtained from Council staff at 235-4785. (PR)
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