A first-time advocate had one message for the U.S. Supreme Court in Tuesday’s arguments involving Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis: Take this “perfect opportunity” to overrule the high court’s discredited, race-based “Insular Cases.” But Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., responding to the lawyer, said he didn’t see the “pertinence.”

The Insular Cases, a series of decisions from the early 1900s, created a distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories, with U.S. citizens of the former enjoying full constitutional rights and an ultimate guarantee of statehood, and citizens of the latter having limited constitutional protections and no guarantee of statehood. Decided by the same court that ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson, they are now regarded as being infused with racial bias.

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