[Authors] Susan Bibler Coutin, Justin Richland, and Véronique Fortin
[Excerpt from Article] In this Article, we examine the form and temporality of plenary power as applied to immigrants and indigenous peoples. To do so, we consider several of the founding cases through which plenary power was established, focusing on their annunciatory-yet-citational quality. Such cases are annunciatory in that, by proclaiming that the U.S. government has plenary power (i.e., full and complete power, free from judicial review, in certain substantive areas) the court in these cases enacts the very power that it announces. They are also citational in that the court does so in a manner that assumes such power always already exists. Moreover, the court announces this power through a denial of its own power, a denial that defers not only to the executive and legislative branches of U.S. government, but also to the future. This deference adopts the form of a citation to precedent, though the prior authority that is being cited to is nothing more than the “self-evidence” of plenary power as something inherent to sovereign nation- states more generally.