Professor Susan K. Serrano published Intersectional Imperial Legacies in the US Territories, exploring how U.S. colonialism has inflicted disproportionate and intersectional harms on women and people who can become pregnant in the U.S. territories. Professor Serrano identifies two key forms of injustice—reproductive oppression and economic exclusion—driven by limited access to healthcare and public benefits. Critically, her article reframes territorial residents’ “political powerlessness” as a continuing legacy of colonial subjugation and proposes a more robust rational-basis-with-bite standard—one that considers the cumulative nature of harm and calls on courts to address how race, gender, poverty, and colonization reinforce political exclusion.

In Ola i ka Malu ʻUlu o Lele: An Emerging Collective Memory of Injustice in Maui Komohana as a Foundation for Recovery from Lahaina’s Wildfires and Restorative Justice for Hawaiʻi, Assistant Professor A. Uʻilani Tanigawa Lum examines how colonial narratives justify decades of dewatering wrought by plantation-era ditch systems, which diverted water for industrial agriculture, tourism, and luxury housing in Maui Komohana—developments that have fueled recurring fires throughout Maui Komohana. She highlights how, in the wake of the August 2023 wildfires, communities across Hawaiʻi pae ʻāina have denounced dominant narratives that frame traditional and customary uses of water as the problem through moʻolelo, mele, hula, and legal advocacy. “E Hoʻi ka Nani”—let the glory return—is a call to reaffirm the Native-centered collective memory of injustice emerging in Maui Komohana today.

Assistant Professor Derek H. Kauanoe’s article, The Role of Human Rights in Advancing Justice for Native Hawaiians: Infusing Indigenous Human Rights with Kanaka Maoli Values, critiques Act 236 for failing to protect Native Hawaiian rights, particularly by authorizing the state to extend certain 65-year public land leases for an additional 40-years. Kauanoe’s analysis demonstrates how Act 236 perpetuates land dispossession, severs cultural connection to land and resources, and undermines Native Hawaiians’ right to self-determination by excluding them from critical decision-making. Kauanoe assesses Act 236’s impact through a restorative justice framework that integrates international human rights norms with four interconnected Kanaka Maoli values: moʻomeheu (cultural integrity), ʻāina (land and natural resources), mauli ola (social determinants of health and well-being), and ea (self-governance).

Assistant Professor MJ Palau-McDonald published Farrington v. Tokushige: Language & Power in Hawaiʻi in a symposium issue of Western Legal History, the journal of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society. In the essay, she reinserts the significant racial dynamics that undergirded the events, cultural depictions, and legal justifications for the school control legislation at issue in Tokushige that were lost in the U.S. Supreme Court’s sterilized decision.