Professor Christina Burnett Testifies on Status of Puerto Rico

Professor Christina Burnett Testifies on Status of Puerto Rico

 

Constitutional Law Scholar Testifies on Puerto Rico Status Debate

 

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New York, June 2, 2010—During testimony before the President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico’s Status, constitutional legal scholar Christina Duffy Burnett, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, addressed the crucial question of whether Puerto Rico and the United States can form a permanent union—“a union that will guarantee U.S. citizenship to the people of Puerto Rico—without the admission of Puerto Rico into the Union as a state.” For more than a century, the issue of Puerto Rico’s national identity and political status has remained unresolved.
 
Last year, President Obama signed an Executive Order to preserve the Task Force’s mission to examine the nature of the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and to advise the President and Congress on policies that promote job creation, education, health care, clean energy, and economic development on the islands.
 
Burnett, who is Puerto Rican and was raised on the island, noted that her aim in testifying was to “do what I can—in a limited amount of time—to assist you in your important work.” She urged task force members to remember what’s at stake: “four million citizens of the United States who have absolutely no voice—no voting representation whatsoever—in the federal government, and who have been in this position—and struggling mightily to get out of it—for a very long time. It is an untenable situation.”  
 
To watch the testimony, click here. NOTE: the relevant testimony begins at the 30:00mark, and Professor Burnett’s testimony starts at 43:00.
 
To read the testimony, click here.
 
Burnett is the co-editor of Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Duke University Press, 2001), and the author of several articles and essays on the constitutional implications of American territorial expansion. She is currently at work on a constitutional and international legal history of American empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
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