that was mostly appointed by FDR amid World War II. During his long law career, Sloan has argued cases in front of the Supreme Court and was appointed by President Obama as the special envoy tasked with trying to shut down theWhy did you want to write a book on the Supreme Court during World War II?Supreme Court
You write a lot about how the war court was a really productive force for progressive policy but was also very timid when it came to challenging FDR. With the worst of courts [part], there’s a negative legacy in terms of the shameful anti-Japanese decisions and the way the court handled the Nazi saboteur case [which involved eight men, including two US citizens, who were tried via military tribunal rather than civilian courts; six were later executed]. I think there are two important lessons in the negative legacy.
The other important lesson is that in those cases, the justices gave excessive deferences to the government’s wildly inflated claims about national security, and that’s a recurring problem. In cases like Korematsu, the government actually had in its possession evidence that belied and undermined its own claims of national security, and they deliberately did not share that with the Supreme Court. So even from the negative side of the court’s legacy, there are very important lessons for us today.