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., $23
ISBN 978-1-962365-04-8
Fall 2026. Purchase copies here.
Part of the series Essays in the Critical Humanities
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.