Source: https://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/trump-v-hawaii-and-chief-justice-robertss-korematsu-overruled-parlor-trick/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 18:46:33+00:00

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In Chief Justice John Roberts’s 5-4 opinion in Trump v. Hawaii deeming President Donald Trump’s third Muslim ban legally valid, one passage stands out as judicial clickbait: its two-paragraph discussion of Koremtasu v. United States.
However, especially in the context of a decision validating a policy primarily motivated by anti-Muslim animus, there is little to find “laudable” in Roberts’s self-serving discussion of Korematsu. Clearly, Roberts saw “rhetorical advantage” (to borrow his own phrase) in characterizing Korematsu as affirming the deprivation of Japanese Americans’ liberty “solely and explicitly on the basis of race” and then proceeding to forcefully denounce the decision. But the Court deserves very little credit for the manner in which it has sought to clothe a decision upholding Trump’s Muslim ban in the garb of purporting to “overrule” Korematsu.
In fact, a careful reading of both Trump v. Hawaii and Korematsu demonstrates that the Court has overruled precisely nothing. For one thing, on Roberts’s own terms the passage discussing Korematsu is entirely dicta. It is revealing for the Court to protest so loudly that Korematsu “has nothing to do with this case,” but in the next breath to proclaim, just as loudly, that it was thereby overruling that ostensibly irrelevant precedent.
More fundamentally, however, Roberts provides an incorrect and misleading account of Korematsu itself—which means that the decision he purports to “overrule” is not quite the one that the Korematsu Court itself actually rendered. Roberts’s opinion characterizes Korematsu as holding that “the forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race” is constitutional. While that formulation operates effectively to make Korematsu seem more distant from Trump v. Hawaii than it actually is, it incorrectly describes what Korematsu actually purported to decide and fails to adequately grapple with the decision’s flaws.
In Korematsu itself, however, the Court did not, in fact, profess to validate “the forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race,” as Roberts suggests. Rather, in a manner very much akin to Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. Hawaii, Justice Hugo Black’s opinion for the Court in Korematsu danced around and downplayed the openly racist context from which the government’s exclusion order emerged. (Contrary to Roberts’s description, Black also focused exclusively on the order excluding Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast—rather than the broader overall policy of exclusion, forcible removal, and incarceration of which the exclusion order was one integral component—and thereby downplayed the strength of the liberty interests at issue.) Like Roberts, Black ultimately proved unwilling to examine the true reasons behind an order that facially purported to rest on security-related grounds independent of racial animus, hostility, or discrimination.
Jackson was unwilling to abdicate the judicial role to that extent. (Neither, it must also be noted, was Jackson ultimately prepared to have the judiciary stand in the way of internment, for which Eugene Rostow criticized him in his 1945 law review article on the Supreme Court’s internment cases.) Jackson noted that “[t]here is sharp controversy as to the credibility of the DeWitt report” that recommended and justified the military’s exclusion and internment orders. “How does the Court know that these orders have a reasonable basis in necessity? No evidence whatever on that subject has been taken by this or any other court,” he added.
Ultimately, Roberts’s emphatic but misleading disavowal of Korematsu functions mostly as a jurisprudential version of protesting that the Court “doesn’t have a racist bone in its body,” or of trotting out the Court’s Japanese American friend to refute any contention that it might be validating racism. At the most obvious level, it affords Roberts and the other justices who validated Trump’s Muslim ban an opportunity to congratulate themselves and take a victory lap for denouncing Korematsu and to fish for favorable reactions to its decision. To a considerable extent, that effort has succeeded. News coverage of Roberts’s discussion of Korematsu has been largely favorable. The opinion’s discussion of Korematsu even seems to have caused some observers opposed to the Court’s ruling to pull their punches a bit in criticizing the decision, tempering their critiques with undeserved applause for Roberts’s denunciation of Korematsu.
At a deeper level, however, Roberts’s narrow and misleading characterization of Korematsu provides further evidence that for the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, the terrain on which constitutional equality issues legitimately arise is narrow, limited, and shrinking. Characterize Korematsu as purporting to expressly validate the “forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race,” and the Roberts Court will happily pat itself on the back for taking the utterly noncontroversial step of decisively repudiating that distorted description of the decision decades after the fact. (As Andrew Prokop reacted on Twitter in response to Roberts’s discussion, “Thanks?”) Characterize the case more accurately instead as one in which the Court failed to adequately grapple with the underlying racism of a policy that purports to rests on grounds other than racial discrimination, and the decision’s actual flaws and true implications become more clear.
Especially at a moment in which the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc has aggressively sought to render suspect the very acts of alleging discrimination and examining evidence in support of discrimination claims, for Roberts and his conservative majority to provide a fully accurate account of Korematsu v. United States and its flaws would have hit uncomfortably close to home. Instead, Roberts engaged in a cheap parlor trick: purporting to “overrule” a narrow, distorted version of Korematsu while simultaneously embracing and replicating that decision’s actual logic and reasoning in the course of his own decision-making. Far from being any cause for celebration, that sleight of hand instead should be regarded as the latest in a series of warning signs for anyone who cares about equality—not only in the context of the Muslim ban itself, but in the context of a wide range of other areas, such as voting rights and racial gerrymandering, in which Roberts and his conservative colleagues have made increasingly clear that they are happy to say one thing and do another.

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