Korematsu

Korematsu v. United States Trial Re-Enactment

/ Seung Hye Yang / 1 Comment

What makes law school worth it, in my opinion, is not the time spent with our noses buried in our textbooks or the late nights spent outlining for exams. It’s the everyday interactions you have with the people around you, and the spaces curated for you by fellow students who want to see you thrive and succeed in a comfortable environment. One such space is APALSA.

I have had the honor of being President of APALSA for the past school year. APALSA is the affinity group dedicated for law students who are of Asian-American and Pacific Island (AAPI) descent, yet it is so much more than that. APALSA provides a safe space for AAPI students to bond and socialize over mutual interests and backgrounds. In a predominantly white institution, it is easy to feel out of place as a student of color. APALSA aims to provide a welcoming environment where students can feel comfortable asking questions and having conversations that may be otherwise difficult to have with non-APALSA students. We pride ourselves on being an inclusive community, with most of our events being open to the general public so that they can share and partake in bits of our culture that we grew up on, whether through the delicious food we serve at general body meetings, the advice we offer during our attorney panels, or the social events we organize for students. 

This year, APALSA undertook a project like no other: a trial re-enactment of Korematsu v. United States.

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Remembering Fred Korematsu

/ Seung Hye Yang / Leave a comment

Korematsu v. United States is easily one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time, and one that people are often unaware of until they get to the strict scrutiny aspect of their Constitutional Law class. In fact, I distinctly remember getting to the World War II portion of history in APUSH back in high school, seeing a brief mention of this case, asking about it in class, only to be brushed off because it “wasn’t important.”

Yesterday was January 30th, 2022: Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution, a day that is mostly only observed in California. On the anniversary of Korematsu, I’d like to draw attention to the article my APALSA mentor, Rosa Kim, wrote up a year ago–and also to weigh in with my own thoughts on the matter.

Korematsu is, undoubtedly, an ugly portion of US History that is often swept under the rug. Fred Korematsu was only 23 when he was ordered by the US Government to evacuate his residence and move into one of the Japanese internment camps prepared in the wake of Pearl Harbor, designed to herd the Japanese American population into controlled areas to supervise them. Anyone “at least 1/16th Japanese” were evacuated. Korematsu was the age many of us students are today when he changed his name and had plastic surgery done to try to avoid this mandate. As a US citizen, he did not understand why he was being herded off to camps as a prisoner merely for the way he looked. He chose to stay at home rather than relocate and was eventually arrested for his violation of the order. Korematsu then courageously appealed his case until it reached the Supreme Court, maintaining that the evacuation order was a violation of his 5th Amendment right.

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Visiting a Concentration Camp Site 77 Years After Korematsu

/ ianramseynorth / Leave a comment

All that remains of the Heart Mountain concentration camp, where the United States imprisoned over 14,000 Americans of Japanese descent between 1942 and 1945, is the camp’s hospital building. Over the course of a few months in 1942, the federal government transformed hundreds of acres in remote northwest Wyoming—near Yellowstone National Park—into the state’s third most populous city. The valley plain beneath Heart Mountain became one of ten “Relocation Centers,” the Orwellian name given to the World War II era camps in which over 100,000 people were imprisoned on the basis of their Japanese heritage. Back then, Heart Mountain was a bustling camp consisting of barracks, mess halls, toilet and laundry facilities, recreation spaces, workshops, schools, the hospital, a courthouse, administration buildings, nine guard towers, and a barbed-wire perimeter fence. This October, when I scanned the horizon for some sense of place or history, all I could make out was the original hospital building and snow-covered fields.

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