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MC: As you know, the Korematsu v. United States, 1944, decision is a very important case in standard Constitutional Law classes because it stands for the proposition that racial categorizations are subject to strict scrutiny, which is a very high level of judicial scrutiny of legislative decision-making. So I'm wondering whether you studied Korematsu sometime in your second or third year of law school, and can you describe that at all?

LB: Uh-huh. Actually, I just mentioned Chuck Lawrence, and Chuck Lawrence was my Constitutional Law professor. And we studied Korematsu in Constitutional Law in my second year. And I remember reading the case, and again, I had learned about the internment during college. I had had a sense about what the internment was all about. But when I read Korematsu was the first time that I really realized that not only had this happened to the Japanese American community, but that the highest court in the country had said that it was okay, which was a horrible realization because not only did a wrong occur to the community, but the Supreme Court, which is the highest authority in the land, said that it was well within the Constitution that this happened to the Japanese American community. And it made me very angry to read the case.

MC: Did your casebook carry any of the dissents, because it was a 6-to-3 decision, and the dissents are very powerful, particularly Justice Murphy's dissent.

LB: Uh-huh.

MC: But usually casebooks have very highly edited versions of the opinions. So I'm assuming that it probably didn't.

LB: Well, I'm not sure if we had the dissents. But because I had Chuck Lawrence as a professor, because he was a person of color, I was able to learn about the Korematsu case in the way I needed to learn about the Korematsu case. And it was important that he validated that it was wrongly decided, that an injustice had been done against Japanese Americans. And I think if Korematsu had been taught in another way, which is purely as just a case with Constitutional doctrine, it would have been an even more outrageous situation for me than it was.

MC: I think you and I know that that's often the way it is in fact taught in law school, and in fact, it's sometimes not taught at all because people just skip over it to a different case that might stand for the same proposition.

LB: Well, and divorcing it from the human reality behind it, I mean, oftentimes Korematsu is taught, ironically, for the principle that racial discrimination is inherently suspect, and it's the worst type of discrimination that can exist. And it's ironic that that is exactly the point that they teach Korematsu for, when in fact, it was an instance when the court upheld an instance of race discrimination. So I think it was really valuable for me that when the case was taught, it was in the context of the human suffering that went on behind it, and that it was looked at in a real critical way, understanding that it represented a really black part of American legal history.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.