Densho Digital Archive - Mary Schroeder Interview (denshovh-smary

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TI: As you were talking it brought back memories for me because I had the opportunity to not only interview Aiko Herzig, who was one of the researchers who found the original Final Report of DeWitt, and some of the lawyers for the Korematsu case, and we interviewed also Peter Irons. And what struck me as you were talking was the amount of work that these individuals did pretty much on a pro bono basis. The amount of research at the National Archives, preparing the legal documents for not only the Hirabayashi, but the Korematsu and Yasui case also. And I just want to get a sense, because when I interview them now, they're slightly older than I am, but when they were doing the case, they were really young. They were really young, inexperienced, most of them right out of law school. And I'm curious, from your perspective, when you saw that -- or maybe the question is, how would you rate their work, these young, primarily Japanese American lawyers?

MS: Oh, I thought that the work that had been done was just extraordinary. I turned my office, when I was working on the opinion -- we heard the opinion in March, I think it was eventually handed down in September. I tried to clear the decks of everything else and then devote the summer to working on the case, and I had to do an extraordinary amount of research myself in order to make sure that it was very well-documented. So I turned my little office conference room into a World War II library, and I read everything that I could find and had my law clerk read everything that we could find on the history of the internment and on the scholarship that had been written about it to make sure that what had been briefed to us and argued to us was truly sound and valid. And we just found no mistakes.

TI: Is that a common process for you to do for a case?

MS: No. You rarely... this was, I would say, once in a lifetime.

TI: And why this case?

MS: Why this case? Because it's extraordinary history. Because you're examining and finding the dimensions of a great injustice that has played such a role in our history. And one knew in 1987 that this was going to be something that would be studied for many years to come. And everything that was written would be a chapter in history that people would read and study for the future. So you wanted to make sure it was done right, and you wanted to make sure that people who were presenting the case to you had done everything that they could. I could find no mistakes. I don't pretend to be as smart or as scholarly as some of them, but in my humble opinion they did a good job.

TI: Yeah, and from my perspective, they really forwarded a lot of the scholarly work based on their research and thinking, it was pretty extraordinary.

MS: Well, they pulled it all together.

TI: And they were able to... I think what we struggled with back then was how did we tell the story or make a case, and I think that's what they really helped, I think, in many cases, the Japanese American community. Because at the same time, in parallel, was the redress effort in terms of going to Congress and getting, Congressional hearings were going on, then later on having Reagan sign the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. So this was all happening about the same time. And what was interesting was how there were many people in the Japanese American community actually critical of these young coram nobis lawyers because they thought that if they lost, it would really screw up the whole redress effort. That they would, on the record, lose to the government and Congress would see that. So in addition to preparing all of that work for the legal case, they had this pressure from the community. It's just a fascinating story.

MS: Yes. And of course there were pressures because the whole world is watching. There are pressures on the court, too, and on a judge working on an opinion like this. Because as an appellate judge, I have to have at least one other vote. There are three judges who hear the case. In this case it was Judge Goodwin who was senior to me on the panel, and he was a veteran of World War II. And in fact, he was in the invasion force that would have invaded Japan if the atomic bomb hadn't been dropped. So he had one historical perspective that was very different from my own. And then the third judge was Jerome Farris of Seattle who, as an African American, was very, as I recall, he was very concerned in this case about the fact that these were citizens who were treated this way. But I had to have, in writing the opinion, I had to make sure that I wrote a strong enough opinion so that I had their agreement. Because as an appellate judge, I couldn't afford to have a dissent, someone strongly dissenting, saying, "This is all water over the dam and you shouldn't be worrying about this," or, "Let's forget about this." And I wanted to make sure that it was, it had to be persuasive enough so that the government didn't want to go to the Supreme Court and say, "Look, you've got to stick by your guns here." So it had to be very, very strong, unusually strong.