Justice Scalia: “You Are Kidding Yourself If You Think” SCOTUS Won’t Vote in Favor of Internment Again

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke yesterday at the
University of Hawaii and when the subject of the Court’s notorious
1944 decision upholding the wartime internment of
Japanese-Americans came up, the conservative justice had a sobering
message for his law school audience. As Audrey McAvoy of the
Associated Press
reports:

Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944
decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the
convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu for violating
an order to report to an internment camp.

“Well of course Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have
repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you
think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students
and faculty during a lunchtime Q-and-A session.

Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning, “In times of war, the
laws fall silent.”

“That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the
invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was
wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time
of war. It’s no justification, but it is the reality,” he said.

I guess this means Justice Elena Kagan is not the only
“paranoid libertarian” on the bench.