| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State. By Natsu Taylor Saito. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. xii, 497 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-87081-851-6.)

Natsu Taylor Saito's From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay, seeks to "reveal in broad strokes" the "significance" of the plenary power doctrine to "American law" (p. 15). Saito argues that the progress of the doctrine reveals much about the way America deals with "those not explicitly enslaved but [who are] the subjugated Other under U.S. law—the people in external colonies, those subject to internal colonial rule, and those explicitly recognized as subjects of another sovereign" (ibid.). Working along with its doctrinal cousin "military necessity," the doctrine allows the American government to deprive relatively powerless groups of protections of judicial review. Presenting itself as "a nation of laws that gives optimal protection to human rights and democratic processes," the United States eschews the jurisdiction of international decision-making bodies," leaving those injured by abusive government policy without effective remedies (p. 14).

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