About · Territorial Review
§ Purpose
The appellate courts of the five inhabited U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa) decide real cases for nearly four million people. Their opinions are public record in name only: scattered across incompatible court websites, never unified, rarely indexed, and for Puerto Rico often locked behind paid, Spanish-language platforms.
Territorial Review exists to fix that. The first commitment is the corpus: the most complete and best-normalized database of the law of the American territories — court opinions and the codes themselves — that anyone has assembled, free to the solo practitioners, legal-aid organizations, and pro se litigants who need it most.
On top of that corpus we are building something newer: grounded legal scholarship in which every citation is verified against the database itself, so that nothing we publish points to a case that does not exist. The database is both the subject and the safeguard. Our method is AI-forward; our standard is human-accountable, with a named editor and a transparent, published verification process.
The aim is not to be cited by courts. It is to become the definitive home for the law of the American territories, and to make a long-overlooked body of American jurisprudence genuinely accessible.
We also know that unifying a scattered, often poorly digitized record means some things will be wrong: a garbled scan, a miscited paragraph, a section that has since been amended. We own that, and we would rather hear about it than hide it. This is a public archive, and it gets more accurate with the public’s help. If you find an error in an opinion or a citation, use the chat button in the corner of any page to tell us. We read every message, and corrections go straight to the editor.
§ How it is built
Court opinions and statutory codes are collected from each jurisdiction's official source, normalized into a single clean structure, and indexed for both keyword and meaning-based search. Every result links back to the issuing court or compiler, so the official record is always one click away. We begin with the Supreme Court of Guam (792 opinions spanning 1996 to the present) and the entire Guam Code Annotated (all 22 titles, searchable today), and expand jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
§ The editor
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Territorial Review, Dizon is a Stanford-trained lawyer admitted in New York, Guam, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. He served as a Research Attorney at the Supreme Court of Guam, drafting bench memoranda and opinion drafts on constitutional and complex civil matters, and as an Assistant Public Defender on the island, where he represented more than a hundred defendants at trial. He began his career in appellate, constitutional, and regulatory litigation at WilmerHale.
That clerkship is where this project began. The territory's law mattered enormously to the people standing before the court, yet it was needlessly hard to find: scattered, unindexed, and easy to overlook. Territorial Review is the answer to a problem he watched up close.
In recent years he led global content and editorial strategy for some of the world's biggest investment conferences, working directly with heads of state teams and the heads of the world's largest financial institutions, and building editorial systems that fold AI-enabled tools into production without surrendering editorial judgment — the same discipline that governs this archive. Today he is building an AI-core law practice in New York, and serves on the New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies. He earlier founded AsylumLegal, a public legal-resource platform on U.S. asylum law. He holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, an M.Sc. with Distinction in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. with Distinction in Political Science from Yale.
Stanford Law (J.D.) · LSE (M.Sc.) · Yale (B.A.) · Admitted in NY · Guam · MD · DC
§ Advisory board
Territorial Review is guided by an advisory board drawn from the territorial bar: practitioners who know this body of law from inside the courtrooms that make it.
The elected Public Auditor of Guam, Cruz is a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Guam. Appointed an associate justice in 1997, he was elected chief justice by his colleagues in 1999 and led the court until his retirement from the bench in 2001, service at the apex of the very judiciary whose law this archive documents. He later returned to public life in the Guam Legislature, where he served as Vice Speaker and then Speaker, before being elected to head the Office of Public Accountability.
Across the bench, the legislature, and the territory's audit office, he brings the board a vantage on Guam's appellate law that few can match, having helped shape that law from the chief justice's chair and watched its consequences ripple through the island's governance since.
Public Auditor of Guam · Former Chief Justice, Supreme Court of Guam · Former Speaker, Guam Legislature · University of Santa Clara (J.D.) · Claremont Men's College (B.A.) · Admitted in Guam
Executive Director of the Guam Public Defender Service Corporation, Hattori has spent more than twenty-five years defending Guamanians who could not otherwise afford counsel. After earning his law degree and joining the Guam Bar in 1994, he served as a law clerk to one of the first justices of the Supreme Court of Guam following that court's establishment in 1996, then built a trial practice grounded in holistic defense, mentorship of younger attorneys, and reform of how the office serves the island.
He brings to the board a working knowledge of how territorial appellate law actually reaches the people it governs, the constituency this archive is built to serve.
Executive Director, Guam Public Defender Service Corporation · Hastings College of the Law (J.D.) · Admitted in Guam
§ The team
Communications Director of Territorial Review, Borja leads the project’s communications strategy, shaping public-facing narratives around its mission, its AI-assisted but human-accountable editorial method, and its work to unify territorial jurisprudence into a single, normalized corpus.
Her career spans journalism, language pedagogy, legal research, and senior roles in the Guam Legislature. She has served as Director of Policy and Communications for the Office of the Honorable Shelly V. Calvo, where she drafted statutory language, coordinated interagency engagement, and developed messaging on language access and disability rights. Earlier, she directed committee operations for the Office of the Honorable Benjamin J.F. Cruz, and served as Senior Law Clerk at the Public Defender Service Corporation, drafting substantive motions, legislative measures, and public testimony.
Before entering law and policy, she taught English and academic writing at the University of Guam and Guam Community College. She began her career as a reporter and assistant editor at Marianas Variety-Guam.
Communications Director, Territorial Review · comms@territorialreview.org · William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (J.D.) · University of Guam (M.Ed., TESOL) · University of Guam (B.A., English)