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 territorial appellate opinions 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 territorial appellate law — and to make a long-overlooked body of American jurisprudence genuinely accessible.
§ How it is built
Opinions 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, 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 expand jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
§ The editor
Karlo Dizon is the founder and editor of Territorial Review. 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 appellate 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.
Today he leads global content and editorial strategy for the Future Investment Initiative (FII), working with principals across finance, law, and technology, and has built editorial systems that fold AI-enabled tools into production without surrendering editorial judgment — the same discipline that governs this archive. 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. from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. from Yale.
Stanford Law (J.D.) · LSE (M.Sc.) · Yale (B.A.) · Admitted in NY · Guam · MD · DC
§ The board
Territorial Review is guided by a board of directors drawn from the territorial bar: practitioners who know this body of law from inside the courtrooms that make it.
Stephen P. Hattori is Executive Director of the Guam Public Defender Service Corporation, where he 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