From the Internment of Japanese Americans to Guantanamo: Justice in a Time of Trial

By A. Wallace Tashima



This is the keynote address by Judge A. Wallace Tashima, United States Justice for the Ninth Circuit Court, at a conference reviewing the judicial issues concerning the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and subsequent legal challenges to the key verdicts which remain the law of the land. Papers from the conference are gathered in "Judgments Judged and Wrongs Remembered: Examining the Japanese American Civil Liberties Cases on Their Sixtieth Anniversary," a symposium issue of the interdisciplinary journal Law and Contemporary Problems. Tashima, who was himself interned as a schoolboy, ranges widely from the constitutional and human rights issues of the internment to contemporary issues posed by Guantanamo and American uses of torture of prisoners in the Bush administration's post 9/11 arsenal in the "war on terror".

The entire issue, which ranges widely over issues of internment and legal challenges to it, and compares the verdicts with other landmark civil rights and civil liberties cases, is available.

Posted at Japan Focus on December 11, 2005.