Preface

The mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was one of the worst violations of civil liberties in the United States.  The Japanese American redress movement of the 1980s produced an historically unique confession of racial wrongdoing by the federal government. At the heart of both the internment and redress stood the Rule of Law—its noble promises and wrenching failures in the context of war, race and politics. Given their significance, the internment and redress are obvious sites for intensive legal inquiry. Yet to date no comprehensive curricular materials—introductory essays, original documents, legal cases, commentary and in-depth study modules—exist to foster their critical examination and study.  This book is one of first impression, in this and other ways.

Audience

Unlike many law textbooks, the book’s comprehensive approach targets three audiences. First, it is aimed at law professors and law students across a spectrum of courses. Second, the book is written to be accessible to professors and students in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in Asian American Studies, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Political Science, Cultural Studies, Sociology and History.  Third, it speaks to civil rights and other social justice advocates, or public intellectuals interested in an in-depth inquiry into the interplay of American culture, government politics, the courts and civil liberties.  The book can be used as the primary text for a course on the internment and redress as well as a supplement for more general courses. Its chapters (or even parts of chapters) also can be studied separately.

Themes

Again, departing from the usual legal casebook, which exists primarily to illustrate specific doctrinal points, this book is organized around three central themes.  Suggested by the title, these are the concepts of race, rights and reparation—particularly as they shape the testing of civil liberties during wartime. Throughout each of the chapters, the notes and questions develop these foundational themes, and ask the reader to make connections across seemingly disparate historical events and legal decisions.

A major issue discussed in all the chapters of the book is the tension between civil rights, civil liberties and national security. Other questions explored include the racial components of legal or social decisions, and the extent to which the Constitution’s equal protection clause protects the rights of racial minority groups.  Yet another theme is the responsibility of governments to acknowledge human rights violations that have occurred in the past.  All of these themes have tremendous contemporary significance.  They are each treated in some detail in Chapter 1, to provide basic conceptual structure and vocabulary.  And they are revisited in the last chapter, Chapter 7, in order to illustrate the ongoing social dialogue and debate about the proper balance among each of these different concepts.

Pedagogy

Legal education often encourages studying law in the absence of non-legal considerations.  This book pays careful attention to both law—understood narrowly as the enforceable pronouncements of the executive, legislative and judicial branches—and to context—the combined influences of politics, economics and culture on race, law and liberty. Each chapter starts with a broad overview essay that provides historical and social context about Asians in America.  Then each chapter presents carefully selected and edited cases, original materials, commentary and questions within a series of detailed, subject-area study modules to facilitate teacher-student-scholar interactions. To assist all readers, and especially non-law school readers, explanatory paragraphs interconnect the various study modules and provide clear, if brief, introductions to essential legal concepts, processes and terminology.  Throughout, the book engages the critical faculties of all audiences by providing thematic overviews, striking details, technical analyses, socio-historical setting and provocative questions.

For law teachers, the pedagogical approach will seem simultaneously familiar and different. The case approach, combined with notes and questions, facilitates an interactive (so-called Socratic) dialogue with students.  At the same time, this book presents these cases not only to illustrate legal doctrine, but also to teach about the impact of historical and political events on diverse areas of law typically not taught in a single class. The book treats subjects such as race relations and critical race theory; constitutional, criminal and national security law; criminal and civil procedure; professional ethics; evidence; legal history; and lawyering practice. A professor in the area of constitutional law, for example, might excerpt relevant portions of the book to supplement the standard, typically decontextualized caselaw treatment of the Korematsu and Hirabayashi cases.

This book is designed to support law professors who want to teach about an historically significant civil liberties and social justice challenge—the Japanese American internment and redress—by infusing it throughout the law school curriculum.  Approaching the study of law through the lens of an issue, rather than through the lens of a specific legal rule, can involve students with their passion and political instincts, as well their analytical abilities. If teaching at its best is about engaging students’ hearts and minds, and provoking stimulating debate, these materials are designed to facilitate just that.

For non-law professors or the law professor who teaches seminars in Asian American jurisprudence, or race and law, the book is organized chronologically. Used in a more linear fashion, the book should highlight law’s relevance to different facets of the Japanese American internment and redress. Instead of an episodic, doctrinally specific approach to the internment, it will reveal how law is part of the overall social and political events of the day. Law then can be viewed and studied as an interconnected web embedded within social context.  Legal doctrine itself is not compartmentalized, but seen as part of a seamless whole, a set of tools to address a social problem.

A few words about our racial terminology: We use the terms White American and African American to denote racial groups that currently are typically  termed White and Black.  Those of Asian and Latin American ancestry are termed, respectively, Asian Americans and Latinas/os.  We employ these terms fully cognizant that race may be best understood as a social construct without fixed or scientific meaning and that our choice of terms may be controversial. Because we provide historical materials, the outdated terms Caucasian, Negro and Oriental are encountered in the text. The various meanings ascribed to these older, arguably offensive, terms are discussed within the book.

Structure

Except for Chapter 1, each of the chapters contains an overview section, which can be read simply to get a feel for the chapter’s contents. Each overview is followed by a section of study modules designed to be separable from other parts of the book.  These modules can be used in specific law school classes.  Finally, each chapter ends with a list of additional readings, so that interested readers can continue study beyond the materials provided here.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide a thematic and historical introduction to the materials. They are a primer both to the theoretical perspectives as well as to the particular incarnations of race, rights, reparations and liberty in Asian American legal history.

Chapters 3 and 4 describe in detail the legal challenges to the internment as well as the experience of the internment from the perspectives of the internees. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the Japanese American redress movement in particular, and reparations movements generally. The coram nobis cases are also examined in depth. Those cases reopened the original internment cases and culminated in judicial declarations of injustice that forged new understandings of the internment and the law ostensibly supporting it. The chapters also explore other redress efforts, including African American claims for reparations.

Finally, Chapter 7 provides contemporary case studies to aid the reader in applying the lessons of the internment and redress to current political and social controversies.  This is a mindful attempt to link the internment and redress to analogous issues of other groups. Congress’s purpose in establishing the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, which provided support for this book, is

• to sponsor research and public educational activities . . . so that the events surrounding the evacuation, relocation, and internment of United States citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry will be remembered, and so that the causes and circumstances of this and similar events may be illuminated and understood. . . .
• Public Law 100-383 (August 10, 1988); 50 U.S.C. app. 1989b-5.

May studying this past prevent similar tragedies in the future.

Eric K. Yamamoto
Margaret Chon
Carol L. Izumi
Jerry Kang
Frank H. Wu

April 2001