When the United States government acquired the Philippine Islands at the end of the Spanish–American War, policy makers suggested that the United States would be exceptional among empires for using its own constitutional traditions to restrain colonial rule. In The Foundations of the Modern Philippine State, Leia Castañeda Anastacio examines how colonial administrators in the Philippines sought to put United States rule of law traditions into practice between 1898, when the United States took formal control of the Islands, and 1935, when Manuel Quezon became the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth.

In this important and field-shaping book, Anastacio draws on English, Spanish, and Tagalog primary source material from the United States and the Philippines to tell “the story of American constitutional colonialism in the Philippine Islands” (13). That story takes readers from the halls of Congress in Washington to the halls of the Ayuntamiento in Manila, which housed the American military governor and later the Philippine Assembly and Philippine Legislature. Along the way, Anastacio interrogates how cases in the Philippine and United States Supreme Courts shaped colonial, and in turn Philippine, politics and institutions.

As Anastacio writes, United States policy in the islands sought to balance “American colonial control with consent and constitutionalism” (13). Colonial infrastructure ensured full United States control while also granting political representation to Filipino subjects. Considering this arrangement, other historians of the Philippines have portrayed United States rule of law discourse “as either entirely enlightened or positively hypocritical” (16). Instead, Anastacio takes legal discourse seriously and provides a refreshingly “nuanced and ambivalent account” (16). With her approach, she joins a cohort of legal historians who have staked out a central place in American legal history for the territorial margins.

Anastacio also breaks new ground. She sees in the Philippines “arguably the earliest test” of the universal applicability of American legal liberalism to a state-building project abroad (12). She focuses on constitutional jurisprudence to show how two core tenets of American legal liberalism shaped colonial politics and public law in the Philippines. The first tenet was the idea that abstract neutral categories and processes would help to constrain government power. The second tenet was the idea that legislative majorities endangered democracy and that their power had to be curbed by constitutional jurisprudence that demarcated “public” and “private” realms.

Anastacio shows that by forming the “background conditions” for constitutional jurisprudence, those tenets masked—and ultimately amplified—power differences between Filipino politicians and American officials. For example, the Philippine Supreme Court relied on Thomas Cooley's 1868 treatise, Constitutional Limitations, to deny an executive-legislative body called the Board of Control the power to appoint directors to government corporations. The decision limited legislative power in what appeared to be a straightforward application of formal neutral rules on legislative authority. However, Cooley's treatise contained an antilegislative bias rooted in concern for curbing the excesses of legislative majorities in the states. Its application to colonial politics ignored the asymmetries between the state legislatures in the United States and the insular legislature in the Philippines. In the end, the decision limited the ability of the all-Filipino legislature to interfere with the authority of the powerful American-appointed executive.

As Anastacio reveals, due process and equal protection cases relied on police power precedents from United States courts to define “the public,” and the legitimate domain of government intervention, broadly. The cases emboldened the colonial government to implement reformist goals by intervening in areas ranging from education to public health to the economy. Yet progressive constitutional interpretation in the islands eliminated an important limitation on the police power. In the American political tradition the police power—the authority to pass laws to protect the health and welfare of the community—belonged to the legislature. The power derived from the sovereign, and the sovereign was the people. But in the Philippines, police powers jurisprudence gave expansive authority to define “the public” to the American executive.

Filipino drafters of the 1935 Philippine Constitution largely adopted the colonial constitutional script: a powerful executive atop a vast administrative apparatus with the prerogative to act in the name of the people, and a legislature and judiciary both with limited ability to check and scrutinize executive action. This script, Anastacio explains, “reproduced” in the Philippine Constitution “the incompatible tendencies of a colonial practice that combined elements of a nineteenth-century liberal individualism on the one hand, with ‘vast extensions in the sphere of governmental functions,’ on the other” (256).

By the eve of World War II, the Commonwealth's top American official, High Commissioner Francis Sayre, sent warnings to Washington that the Commonwealth's first President, Manuel Quezon, appeared to be moving in “the direction of a dictatorial or oligarchical control of government rather than of democracy” (259). Later, Ferdinand Marcos would sustain a 21-year (1965–86) authoritarian regime before being ousted by a series of popular demonstrations in Manila known as the People Power Revolution.

From World War II on then, United States authorities and scholars considered what happened to American constitutional principles in the islands. They often assumed that the Quezon and Marcos presidencies reflected a departure from American constitutional designs. Anastacio has found institutional continuity.

As with the Philippines, scholars have recurrently asked about various United States international democracy and development programs in the twentieth century, “what went wrong?” Scholars in the future will have to contend with Anastacio's challenge to that way of framing the inquiry. Perhaps, it went just as designed.