My beloved and enchanted Island of Puerto Rico, where I taught Roman Law and Constitutional Theory from 1998 to 2009, has lost another larger-than-life legend: Judge Juan Torruella (pictured below), who died at the age of 87 on Monday, October 26. Here is a short bio. Judge Torruella was not only a federal judge–the first Puerto Rican to sit on a federal appeals court–he was also an eloquent and vocal critic of Puerto Rico’s second-class, semi-colonial constitutional status. His book The Supreme Court and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal (Editorial UPR, 1985) is still one of my all-time favorite legal history books of all time. I still remember reading it for the first time while I was in law school (shout out to my friend and law school classmate Carlos Soltero, who first recommended this book to me). It was Torruella’s learned book that brought “The Insular Cases” to my attention–a set of cases decided between 1901 and 1921 enshrining Puerto Rico’s second-class constitutional status and a dreadful judicial wrong that has still not been rectified after over a century.