Liza Minno is an organizer, educator, and nonfiction writer. She is a doctoral student in New York University’s American Studies program. She is based in Brooklyn and New Jersey. This is her first book.
Rule of Innocents: White Settler Sentiment
and the Supreme Court
by Liza Minno
5.5 x 8.5, 120 pgs., $25
ISBN 978-1-962365-04-8
Fall 2026. Purchase copies here.
Part of the series Essays in the Critical Humanities
"Surging from a stream of radical, anticolonialist and liberationist thought, Rule of Innocents exposes how the settler world’s cultivated 'feelings' construct a theater of ongoing colonial warfare. What happens when white settler sentiment becomes codified as Empire’s law? Liza Minno has created an indispensable analytic toolbox for rescripting and retheorizing the long colonial lexicons of citizenship, individual rights, constitutional law, and sovereignty. This book deprovincializes the U.S. Supreme Court, Federal Indian policy, and settler-defined tribal sovereignty, exposing how they construct a wretched totality cohered through the aggressive fragility of white colonial identities.
—Dylan Rodríguez, Distinguished Professor,
University of California, Riverside
“In this vital new book, Liza Minno argues that U.S. settler colonial society is sustained by the white settler population’s belief in its own innocence and victimization and its willful ignorance and disavowal of the violent horrors perpetuated against Indigenous nations. Minno’s illuminating analyses of three Supreme Court cases explain how the feelings and sentiments of white settlers are prioritized over Indigenous life and over a basic sense of justice. Minno takes no prisoners in a devastating, clear-eyed assessment of the damage wrought by white settler colonial innocence. This ‘rule of innocents’ is a pillar of the United States legal and political system as it is to Zionist and settler defenses of Israel’s genocidal actions against the people of Gaza. This is a bold and ambitious book, a must-read for our time.”
—Kevin Bruyneel
"A devastating critique of the history of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Indigenous rights. The ways in which white grievance has been constitutionally mobilized to secure white property rights for well over half a century has seen the unmitigated abrogation of Indigenous sovereignty. Unelected, with a singular power to make decisions about Indigenous rights, the Court has done everything in its power to undermine Indigenous sovereignty. Rule of Innocents invites us to take a hard look at the power invested in the Supreme Court, regardless of its ideological makeup, because of its capacity to continually strip away Indigenous rights." —Grant Farred, author of Grievance: In Fragments
"Delivers a penetrating analysis of settler colonialism in the United States. It reveals the internal logic of settler nationalism by meticulously dissecting the affective economies of white injury and virtue that animate America’s genocidal intent towards Indigenous nations. It leaves no doubt that our collective attending to settler colonialism is a non-negotiable for any useful analysis of the U.S. legal and political landscape, past, present, and future. I predict Rule of Innocents will join a distinguished list of key sources for teaching, thinking, and mobilizing around settler colonialism that will inspire and instruct for many years to come."
—Melanie K. Yazzie
“A persuasive, sober, and thoughtfully crafted account of three critically important Supreme Court rulings that vividly shows how tenuous Indigenous sovereignty’s position is vis-v-vis white settler 'innocence and victimhood' and how U.S. law is the primary vehicle accounting for this unstable state of affairs.” —David Wilkins
Through a close reading of three contemporary Supreme Court cases, Rule of Innocents reckons with the materiality of white settler sentiments and asks how law is used to regulate the emotional life of the settler state. How do white settlers’ feelings of innocence, virtue, at-homeness, and victimization vis à vis Native people and tribal sovereignty get codified into law? And why is the Supreme Court a unique vehicle for that codification?
Rule of Innocents tracks how settler sovereignty attempts to make itself real through the repetition of sentiment. It explores the antirelational separability and disidentification that allows white settlers to disavow the violent reality of living in a late settler colonial society. While it is tempting to dismiss white settlers’ experiences of feeling like innocent victims as delusory expressions of privilege, this book aims to take white settler sentiment seriously—to understand its affective, libidinal, and material rewards—as a crucial technology of the settler state’s drive to expand and legitimate its fundamentally contested sovereignty and to delimit the horizon of decolonial possibility. Rule of Innocents explores how settler law can become the concrete manifestation of settler sentiment, giving that sentiment a materiality, often a lethal materiality, for Indigenous people and land. At a time when much of liberal civil society cries out for the familiar trappings of the rule of law in the United States it is urgent to understand how that rule of law has always licensed the violence of settler colonialism and has always facilitated the rule of those who understand themselves as innocents.