"As a gay man I applaud this decision. The court may be acting in bad faith, they may be hostile to gay rights, but..."

"... this ruling will help protect gay kids and gender non-conforming kids from this insane gender ideology that suggests that they may have been born in the wrong bodies if they don't fit some retrograde heterosexual gender role. You can't argue on one hand that gender is 'fluid' and on the other that it is somehow fixed in small children who have yet to experience puberty. This is madness, especially as we know these medical procedures lead to a lifetime of medical issues and a shorter lifespan. Only an adult can make these decisions for themselves."

Writes John02116 in the comments section to the Megan McArdle column, "The ACLU bet big on a trans rights case. Its loss was predictable. A Supreme Court ruling shows trans advocates failed to see the fragility of the liberal consensus" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can see the big disconnect between the column and the comments).

An even more strongly worded comment comes from JR Colorado:

"Immigrants’ rights advocates today sued the Trump administration over its executive order that seeks to strip certain babies born in the United States of their U.S. citizenship...."

"The lawsuit charges the Trump administration with flouting the Constitution’s dictates, congressional intent, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent."

The Legal Defense Fund announced last night.

“... This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans...” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ...

The Constitution’s 14th Amendment... states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”... In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that children born in the United States to immigrant parents were entitled to U.S. citizenship.... 

"We must face a simple truth. To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now."

Said President Biden, in the 4th year of his presidency, facing up, at long last, to the "simple truth."

Quoted in "In Shift, Biden Issues Order Allowing Temporary Border Closure to Migrants The move shows how drastically immigration politics have shifted in the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union said it planned to challenge the order in court" (NYT).

“The administration has left us little choice but to sue,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer at the A.C.L.U, which led the charge against the Trump administration’s attempt to block asylum in 2018 and resulted in the policy being stopped by federal courts. “It was unlawful under Trump and is no less illegal now.”...

No one's above the law.

The ACLU sides with Trump: The gag order is unconstitutional.

 The Hill reports.

[U.S. district judge Tanya] Chutkan’s gag order, which is currently paused, bars Trump and his attorneys from speech that would “target” foreseeable witnesses, prosecutors in the case and court personnel....

The ACLU said the order is vague enough to violate Trump’s due process rights, contending he “cannot possibly know” what he is permitted to say.

“The entire order hinges on the meaning of the word ‘target,’” the ACLU wrote in its brief. “But that meaning is ambiguous, and fails to provide the fair warning that the Constitution demands, especially when, as here, it concerns a prior restraint on speech.”

The civil liberties group also contended the order is overly broad in violation of Trump’s First Amendment rights, saying it could prevent him from speaking about key points in the campaign, including the results of the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Boldface added (to highlight First Amendment doctrine). 

This is the D.C. federal court case, but there's also a gag order in the civil fraud trial in state court in New York. Trump has been fined twice for violating the state court gag order, and Trump took the stand in in that case yesterday.

The state court judge, Arthur Engoron, questioned Trump about his saying there is a “very partisan judge with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him, perhaps even more partisan than he is.” Was he talking about the judge's law clerk? Trump testified that he was talking about Michael Cohen! How was Michael Cohen, a witness, "sitting alongside" the judge?

Did Trump lie under oath? That's a separate matter, of course, with no bearing on the question whether the gag orders violate Trump's free-speech rights. 

ADDED: If you're trying to picture the seating arrangement: "The judge's clerk, Allison Greenfield, typically sits right next to the judge, and during pretrial hearings often questioned attorneys for the two sides herself."

"Are 10 minutes of shouting out of an hour-and-a-half-long event too much? That is a matter of judgment and degree."

Said Nadine Strossen, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union, quoted in "At Stanford Law School, the Dean Takes a Stand for Free Speech. Will It Work? After a student protest, Jenny S. Martinez wrote a much-praised memo defending academic freedom. But that protest shows how complicated protecting free speech can be" (NYT).

If you get the balance wrong, Ms. Strossen said, then you risk chilling speech on the other side....

Ms. Strossen said she was struck that [a week later, when she appeared on a panel at Yale], there were no protesters of any kind. “I worry that maybe the reason that there weren’t even nondisruptive protests,” she said, “is students were too afraid that they would be subject to discipline or doxxing.” 

Strossen spoke at Stanford in January, a guest of the Federalist Society. That was 2 months before the famously disrupted visit by Judge Kyle Duncan. Strossen says that Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion — widely criticized for her handling of the Duncan event — moderated her event. According to Strossen, "That took some courage." It was "extraordinary."

Pause a moment to absorb that.

After the Depp/Heard verdict, let's talk about the role played by the ACLU.

There's this column, from Erik Wemple — "Depp-Heard case hinged on the world’s worst #MeToo op-ed." Wemple's column, like the "world's worst #MeToo op-ed," was published in the Washington Post:

The first draft came off the keyboards of the ACLU, via consultation with Heard. Four lawyers at the ACLU reviewed it to ensure that it aligned with the organization’s policy positions. Heard’s lawyers separately scrubbed it for compliance with a nondisclosure provision of her divorce settlement, according to an ACLU spokesperson. 

"If it’s not something 'we' ever did, what substance is there to the assurance that 'we' won’t be doing it?"

"Somehow it was the 'digital team'—that is, whoever tweets under the name of the organization. Seems like those folks are part of the 'we.' I’m amused to find myself objecting once again to their use of pronouns." 

I wrote, over on Facebook, responding to a hamhanded nonapology from Anthony Romero, the head of the ACLU:

“We won’t be altering people’s quotes.... It was a mistake among the digital team. Changing quotes is not something we ever did.” 

The quote was published in the NYT in "A.C.L.U. Apologizes for Tweet That Altered Quote by Justice Ginsburg." 

I added the boldface to "we." The earlier pronoun difficulty — the one for which Romero nonapologized — was a brutalization of a quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She'd written:

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.” 

The ACLU rewrite was: 

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity … When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”

I am person, hear me roar make a sound associated with a non-human animal..

The @ACLU is right to celebrate the achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the anniversary of her death.

And also to point out that she was a vile transphobic bigot whose words must be erased from history. https://t.co/Q8yvY8bnCX

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) September 22, 2021

The following songs have been approved by the @ACLU. 🎶

“No [Person] No Cry” - Bob Marley

“I’m Every [Person]” - Chaka Khan

“Isn’t [They] Lovely” - Stevie Wonder

“Does Your [Birthing Person] Know” - ABBA

“Bring Your [Offspring With A Cervix] To The Slaughter” - Iron Maiden

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) September 23, 2021

"The Capitol buildings and grounds are quintessential places for free speech and protest, accessible by people from all walks of life who gather there to express their views, demonstrate, picket, and hold vigils."

"But if those places are permanently fenced off, the public and our constitutional right to assemble and protest will be in jeopardy. That is why the ACLU and the ACLU of the District of Columbia are urging leaders of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate not to permanently fence off the Capitol, which would turn its architecture into a national symbol of fear and hostility towards the public’s presence.... The Capitol complex, where all our elected lawmakers come together to legislate in the open view of the public, has been recognized around the world as a celebrated symbol of democracy. If Congress were to permanently retreat into a militarized zone ringed by fencing topped with razor wire, it would send the kind of message that heads of autocratic regimes send by cloistering themselves away from their populaces in armored fortresses.... The public will suffer diminished access to public grounds with unique importance in the exercise of their constitutional rights to assemble and to petition the government. That exclusion will be especially acute if people want to participate in spontaneous protest in response to rapidly unfolding events—such as the protests for racial justice that arose last summer...."

From the ACLU website.

"How is Face Recognition Surveillance Technology Racist?... How is face surveillance an anti-Black technology?"

Question answered at the ACLU website. 

First, the technology itself can be racially biased.... Buolamwini and Gebru’s 2018 research concluded that some facial analysis algorithms misclassified Black women nearly 35 percent of the time, while nearly always getting it right for white men.... These error-prone, racially biased algorithms can have devastating impacts for people of color.... 

Second, police in many jurisdictions in the U.S. use mugshot databases to identify people with face recognition algorithms....  Across the U.S., Black people face arrest for a variety of crimes at far higher rates than white people. Take cannabis arrests, for just one example... 

Third... the entire system is racist.... Surveillance of Black people in the U.S. has a pernicious and largely unaddressed history, beginning during the antebellum era.... [There is] spying that targets political speech, too often conflated with “terrorism,” and spying that targets people suspected of drug or gang involvement. In recent years, we learned of an FBI surveillance program targeting so-called “Black Identity Extremists,” which appears to be the bureau’s way of justifying domestic terrorism investigations of Black Lives Matter activists.... Racial disparities in the government’s war on drugs are well documented.

I was reading that because of this vote in my city last night: "Madison City Council bans city agencies from using facial recognition technology" (Wisconsin State Journal).

"Drug enforcement agents should not be conducting covert surveillance of protests and First Amendment protected speech."

"That kind of monitoring and information sharing may well constitute unwarranted investigation of people exercising their constitutional rights to seek justice. The executive branch continues to run headlong in the wrong direction."

Said Hugh Handeyside, a senior attorney for the ACLU, quoted in "The DEA Has Been Given Permission To Investigate People Protesting George Floyd’s Death/The Justice Department gave the agency the temporary power 'to enforce any federal crime committed as a result of the protests over the death of George Floyd'" (BuzzFeed News).

"Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' revised federal guidelines on how sexual assault allegations should be handled on college and K-12 campuses are the target of a federal lawsuit..."

"... filed Thursday claiming that the changes would 'inflict significant harm' on victims and 'dramatically undermine' their civil rights. The suit, filed [by the American Civil Liberties Union] on behalf of four advocacy groups for people who have been sexually assaulted, including Know Your IX and Girls for Gender Equity, is the first that seeks to block the Education Department's new provisions before they go into effect on Aug. 14. The rules championed by DeVos effectively bolster the rights of due process for those accused of sexual assault and harassment, allowing for live hearings and cross-examinations."

Yahoo News reports.

"'No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,' john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me."

"'What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.' Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. 'I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,' he said. 'My family was not pleased with me, but I said, Look, they have First Amendment rights, too. So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?'... In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. 'These days, we’d say, That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,' powell said. 'But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.' He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. 'The knee-jerk response is Nothing we can do, it’s speech. ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ What harm? It’s just words. That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.'"

From "How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley Into a Free-Speech Circus/Public universities have no choice but to welcome far-right speakers seeking self-promotion. Should the First Amendment be reinterpreted for the digital age?" by Andrew Marantz (in The New Yorker).

Is "self-promotion" a special right-wing motivation? Is there some idea that a left-wing speaker promotes his ideas, but a right-wing speaker promotes only himself — that left-wingers are earnest and sincere and bring substance to the campus milieu but right-wingers are demagogues who belong in the hinterlands, braying to some mob?

There's a lot about Milo Yiannopoulos in that article, by the way.

As for john a. powell, he's saying things that are scarcely new. They were standard fare in the legal academy a quarter century ago. That is, it's already "a generation later." His sarcasm at "It’s just words" sounds straight out of "Only Words," the book Catharine MacKinnon published in 1994, and "Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment (New Perspectives on Law, Culture, and Society)" a collection of essays some Critical Race theory lawprofs put out in 1995.

These ideas have been pushed for a very long time, and there's still an intense effort to clear the campus of competing ideas about freedom of speech. I was utterly surrounded by those left-wing views back in the early 90s, and I find it wonderful that they're still so outré that a lawprof today presents them as intriguingly new. What a miracle that Americans still believe in freedom of speech!

ADDED: The NYT has a very similar article today, "The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience" by a philosophy professor, Bryan W. Van Norden. He wants elite institutions to embrace forthright viewpoint discrimination — justified by portraying the ideas he finds offensive as "ignorant":

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has complained that men can’t “control crazy women” because men “have absolutely no respect” for someone they cannot physically fight. Does this adolescent opinion deserve as much of an audience as the nuanced thoughts of Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of “himpathy” in supporting misogyny?...

There is a clear line between censoring someone and refusing to provide them with institutional resources for disseminating their ideas... What just access means in terms of positive policy is that institutions that are the gatekeepers to the public have a fiduciary responsibility to award access based on the merit of ideas and thinkers. To award space in a campus lecture hall to someone like Peterson who says that feminists “have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination”...  is not to display admirable intellectual open-mindedness. It is to take a positive stand that these views are within the realm of defensible rational discourse, and that these people are worth taking seriously as thinkers.

Neither is true: These views are specious, and those who espouse them are, at best, ignorant, at worst, sophists. The invincibly ignorant and the intellectual huckster have every right to express their opinions, but their right to free speech is not the right to an audience. 

"The ACLU is no longer a neutral defender of everyone’s civil liberties. It has morphed into a hyper-partisan, hard-left political advocacy group...."

"The headline in the June 8 edition of the New Yorker tells it all: 'The ACLU is getting involved in elections — and reinventing itself for the Trump era.'... Since its establishment nearly 100 years ago, the ACLU has been, in the words of the New Yorker, 'fastidiously nonpartisan, so prudish about any alliance with any political power that its leadership, in the 1980s and 90s, declined even to give awards to likeminded legislators for fear that it might give the wrong impression.' I know, because I served on its national board in the early days of my own career. In those days, the board consisted of individuals who were deeply committed to core civil liberties, especially freedom of speech, opposition to prosecutorial overreach and political equality. Its board members included Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, right wingers and left wingers, all of whom supported neutral civil liberties. The key test in those days was what I have come to call “the shoe on the other foot” test: Would you vote the same way if the shoe were on the other foot, that is, if the party labels were switched? Today, the ACLU wears only one shoe, and it is on its left foot. Its color is blue...."

Writes Alan Dershowitz.

"Civil libertarians should be concerned whenever the government interferes with the lawyer-client relationship."

"Clients should be able to rely on confidentiality when they disclose their most intimate secrets in an effort to secure their legal rights. A highly publicized raid on the president’s lawyer will surely shake the confidence of many clients in promises of confidentiality by their lawyers. They will not necessarily understand the nuances of the confidentiality rules and their exceptions. They will see a lawyer’s office being raided and all his files seized. I believe we would have been hearing more from civil libertarians — the American Civil Liberties Union, attorney groups and privacy advocates — if the raid had been on Hillary Clinton’s lawyer. Many civil libertarians have remained silent about potential violations of President Trump’s rights because they strongly disapprove of him and his policies. That is a serious mistake, because these violations establish precedents that lie around like loaded guns capable of being aimed at other targets."

Writes Alan Dershowitz in "Targeting Trump's lawyer should worry us all."

"Black Lives Matter Students Shut Down the ACLU's Campus Free Speech Event Because 'Liberalism Is White Supremacy.'"

Writes Robby Soave at Reason.com:

At first, [American Civil Liberties Union's Claire Gastañaga, a W & M alum] attempted to spin the demonstration as a welcome example of the kind of thing she had come to campus to discuss, commenting "Good, I like this," as they lined up and raised their signs. "I'm going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I'm going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience."

It was the last remark she was able to make before protesters drowned her out with cries of, "ACLU, you protect Hitler, too." They also chanted, "the oppressed are not impressed," "shame, shame, shame, shame," (an ode to the Faith Militant's treatment of Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones, though why anyone would want to be associated with the religious fanatics in that particular conflict is beyond me), "blood on your hands," "the revolution will not uphold the Constitution," and, uh, "liberalism is white supremacy."...

These students have clearly made up their minds about free speech: they don't want to share it with anyone else—especially Nazis, but also civil liberties lawyers who happen to be experts on the thing they are willfully misunderstanding: the First Amendment. Their ideological position is obviously incoherent—Liberalism is white supremacy? What?—and would not stand up to scrutiny, which is probably why they have decided to make open debate an impossibility on campus. They really shouldn't get away with this.

I wouldn't assume the "ideological position is obviously incoherent," but chanting is not an attempt to provide a coherent explanation. Why doesn't William and Mary stage a debate on the proposition "Liberalism is white supremacy" and have a speaker who will try to present the idea coherently? Or are debates and demands for ideological coherence the stuff of white supremacy?

The liberals in my town did a tremendous amount of chanting during the anti-Scott-Walker protests of 2011. A favorite chant was "shame, shame, shame, shame," which Soave calls "an ode to the Faith Militant's treatment of Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones." That's not the association the "shame" chant has for me, and by the way, I am so sick of references to "Game of Thrones."

Anyway, chants have their place and can be very effective persuasion. I'm thinking of "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Did that have — did that need — ideological coherence?

I'd love to hear debate on these topics, but I know they'd probably just get shouted down. When you stage in-person events, you create opportunities, and some people will grab what they can. To say "They really shouldn't get away with this" is not to prescribe a remedy to this persistent phenomenon, which is part of living in a free society, as Claire Gastañaga seemed to be trying to say before she gave up on controlling the stage that was set up for her.

One might say the freedom of speech is obviously incoherent. But freedom is good, incoherent or not.

"The A.C.L.U. needs a more contextual, creative advocacy when it comes to how it defends the freedom of speech."

"The group should imagine a holistic picture of how speech rights are under attack right now, not focus on only First Amendment case law. It must research how new threats to speech are connected to one another and to right-wing power. Acknowledging how criminal laws, voting laws, immigration laws, education laws and laws governing corporations can also curb expression would help it develop better policy positions. Sometimes standing on the wrong side of history in defense of a cause you think is right is still just standing on the wrong side of history."

That's from a NYT op-ed by K-Sue Park ("a housing attorney and the Critical Race Studies fellow at the U.C.L.A. School of Law") called  "The A.C.L.U. Needs to Rethink Free Speech."

Contextual... creative... holistic... these are the subtleties that grease the way to the end of constitutional rights.

Thanks to the ACLU for standing up for free speech where it counts — when the speaker is hated.

You can donate to the ACLU here.

"Portland mayor asks feds to bar free-speech and anti-sharia rallies after stabbings."

That's the hard-to-believe headline at The Washington Post.

Quite aside from the mind-crushingly unAmerican idea of banning free speech about free speech, why is the federal government involved?

The federal government controls permitting for the plaza where both rallies are set to take place. The city of Portland will not issue any of its own permits allowing organizers to hold the events elsewhere, [Mayor Ted] Wheeler said.

The organizer of what is called the “Trump Free Speech Rally,” Joey Gibson, said: “There’s going to be more intensity, there’s going to be more threats. They’re using the deaths of these two people and Jeremy Christian — they’re using it to get Portland all rowdy about our June 4 rally and it’s absolutely disgusting.”

The ACLU — it's still true! — supports free speech:

“It may be tempting to shut down speech we disagree with, but once we allow the government to decide what we can say, see, or hear, or who we can gather with, history shows us that the most marginalized will be disproportionately censored and punished for unpopular speech. If we allow the government to shut down speech for some, we all will pay the price down the line.” 

WaPo found a Portland State University professor, a "longtime activist" named Tom Hastings to reject the ACLU position: “I know these lines are perceived as pretty fuzzy when we’re dealing with constitutional First Amendment rights. But there’s no long fuse anymore. Everybody’s fuse seems to be quite short.” What?! Things are "fuzzy" and "fuses" are deemed short, and that's enough to throw out the free-speech tradition?!

WaPo tells us that Portland has a problem with "anarchists" getting violent at "peaceful anti-Trump demonstrations."

In April, Portland’s typically family-friendly rose parade was canceled after antifa activists threatened to shut down roads if a Republican group wasn’t barred from the event. And earlier this month, dozens of “black bloc” anarchists destroyed property at May Day protests.

So violence gets its way? What a twisted response to the horrible murders!

"I just can't understand why the ACLU defends free speech for racists, sexists, homophobes and other bigots. Why tolerate the promotion of intolerance?"

A question, asked and answered at the ACLU website.

I'm just reading the ACLU website, because I'm seeing that the ACLU is doing fabulously well raising money right now:

This weekend alone, the civil liberties group received more than $24 million in online donations from 356,306 people, a spokesman told The Washington Post early Monday morning, a total that supersedes its annual online donations by six times.

The ACLU rakes in money from people who like what they see them doing right now. I trust the ACLU to outrage its transitory fans on other occasions.

It's a good day to think about Fred Korematsu.

Google reminds us — not because of fear-of-dangerous-outsiders doings over the weekend — but because the man was born 100 years ago today. I presume this Google doodle was in the works before the election and would have run today if Hillary Clinton had been elected and thrown open the doors to Middle Eastern refugees.

Or... wait. What would Hillary Clinton have done? Remember when Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton "would bring in 620,000 refugees in her first term, alone, with no effective way to screen or vet them"? That was on September 20th. I'm reading that quote at Politifact, which rates Trump's statement FALSE.

But Hillary Clinton didn't throw it in our face that she was going to block entry into the country and subject newcomers to extreme vetting. That's what Trump did. Hillary had the kind of nuanced position that allowed you to think — if you liked her — that she'd have a big heart toward the suffering and simultaneously protect us from terrorists or — if you didn't like her — that she had no plan and no nerve to stop the influx of masses of people, some of whom hate the American system and want to kill us.

Not enough people liked her, the system we love made Donald Trump our President, and now he is shocking the people who didn't like him by doing what he said in plain language he was going to do.

But many years ago, a President who is revered by the kind of people who like Hillary Clinton issued an Executive Order excluding all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.



The Democratic Party's all-time favorite President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, decided to take action against all persons of Japanese descent because "the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage."

Fred Korematsu stayed where he was, in Oakland, California, where he was born. Soon enough, he got arrested:

Shortly after Korematsu's arrest, Ernest Besig, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in northern California, asked him whether he would be willing to use his case to test the legality of the Japanese American internment. Korematsu agreed, and was assigned civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins. The American Civil Liberties Union in fact argued for Ernest Besig not to fight Korematsu’s case, since many high-ranking members of the ACLU were close to Franklin Roosevelt, and the ACLU didn’t want to be perceived badly in time of war. Besig decided to take Korematsu's case in spite of this....

The ACLU — which is in the news today as it fights Trump's executive order — fought for Korematsu and ultimately lost in the Supreme Court. "Ultimately" is not the right word, because you could say that in later years academic and public opinion shifted strongly in his favor, and with enough distance from World War II, we looked with disgust at what FDR arrogation of power and the Supreme Court feeble response. Korematsu ultimately won. He's a hero of history, celebrated in a Google doodle on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

But that's not "ultimately" either. American history rolls on.