Defining Status: A Comprehensive Analysis Of U.S. Territorial Policy

The United States today governs eight populated entities--American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in the Atlantic--with a total population of 3.68 million people. This is the first book to analyze the legal and political issues with respect to the U.S. territories, Commonwealths and Freely Associated States. Defining Status has been cited as an authoritative reference by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress. The author analyzes the possibility of statehood for Guam ad the Virgin Islands, and explores the bounds of the Commonwealths and Freely Associated States. He discusses these status alternatives against the backdrop of the political, economic, geographic and cultural uniqueness of each territory so that the reader unfamiliar with the particular territory may enter into the status discussion with sufficient knowledge of each territory. Long now out of print, the book is now being made available once more. The book sets out the entire original book, including its lengthy bibliography.

Arnold Leibowitz has written extensively about the territories, Commonwealth, and Freely Associated States of the United States, and has represented almost all of them before the Federal government since 1964 when he was General Counsel of the U.S.-P.R. Commission on the Status of Puerto Rico. He was counsel to the Guam and Virgin Islands Constitutional Commission and Commission on Self-Determination and to the Virgin Islands Commission on Status, and has represented the governments of Guam, American Samoa and the Republic of Palau.