At SCOTUSblog,Lyle Denniston has an interesting post on an effort by lawyers who represented Fred Korematsu and other victims of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II to persuade the Obama administration to advocate the overruling of Korematsu v. United States, the notorious 1944 Supreme Court decision that upheld the forcible internment of over 100000 Japanese-Americans during World War II [HT: GMU law student Rebecca Bucchieri]:
Lawyers who worked for years — ultimately successfully — to clear the names of U.
S. citizens of Japanese ancestry who were convicted of violating government detention policy during World War II are trying to persuade the Obama administration to join in wiping off the books the Supreme Court rulings of that time, or upholding those detentions. The most renowned of those rulings – often reviled – was the 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States.
The lawyers did so in a letter final week to U.
S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli,Jr., attempting to shape the government’s response to a new Supreme Court appeal that attacks the Korematsu decision. They want the government to formally repudiate (to reject, decline) that precedent, or tell the Court that it is no part of the justification nowadays for detention of U.
S. citizens during the war on terrorism.
The new case is Hedges v. Obama (docket 13-758),an attempt to revive a constitutional challenge to Congress’s recent support of presidential power to detain suspected terrorists….
While Congress was debating that measure, a controversy arose over how far it would depart, and whether at all,to permit the detention without trial of U.
S. citizens captured inside the U.
S. In a compromise effort to resolve that dispute, Congress included a statement that now seems ambiguous approximately what was intended. In the Hedges case, and the claim is that the statement can be [...]The post Lawyers for Victims of WWII Internment of Japanese-Americans Urge Overruling of Korematsu appeared first on The Volokh Conspiracy.
Source: volokh.com