The significance of the Insular Cases goes beyond the law. In distinguishing between “incorporated” and “unincorporated” parts of the United States, these cases enshrined the notion that some places in the country weren’t truly part of the country. Some territories—namely, the ones filling up with white settlers—could hope for statehood. Others would hang, as the chief justice put it, like a “disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.”
