"I didn't feel guilty because I didn't do anything wrong."

Fred Korematsu died this week, but his name is permanently enshrined in constitutional law. He was one of the hardy souls who resist government action and produce the cases that test the limits of government power. He resisted the order to remove persons of Japanese ancestry from the west coast during WWII. He wanted to be left alone, to continue living and working where he was, and to marry the woman he loved, an Italian-American.

"I didn't feel guilty because I didn't do anything wrong," he told The New York Times four decades later. "Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, 'with liberty and justice for all,' and I believed all that. I was an American citizen, and I had as many rights as anyone else."