The Court at War

The Supreme Court during World War II issued some of the most notorious opinions in its history, including the Japanese exclusion case, Korematsu v. United States, and the Nazi saboteur military commission case, Ex parte Quirin. For a fresh take on these and related cases and a broader perspective on the Supreme Court during World War II, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Cliff Sloan, a professor at Georgetown Law Center and a former Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure, to discuss his new book, which is called “The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made.”  

They discussed how the Court's decisions during World War II were informed by the very close personal bonds of affection that most of the justices had with President Roosevelt and by the justices’ intimate attachment to and involvement with the war effort. They also discussed the fascinating internal deliberations in Korematsu, Quirin, and other momentous cases, and the puzzle of why the same court that issued these decisions also, during the same period, issued famous rights-expanding decisions in the areas of reproductive freedom, voting rights, and freedom of speech.

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