The Bill of Rights was written precisely to protect individuals against governmental abuses of power like this. And yet, in 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the order’s constitutionality. Writing for the majority in Korematsu v. United States, Justice Hugo Black said Americans of Japanese descent were incarcerated “because we are at war with the Japanese empire,” not because of racial “hostility.” But that was obviously untrue, as Justice Black suggested in an interview decades later, saying that “people were rightly fearful of the Japanese” because to non-Japanese people “they all look alike.”

Today the Korematsu decision is widely regarded as one of the court’s most shameful. But it has never been overturned because the issue hasn’t come up again.

How much will that matter in the coming months and years? The consensus among lawyers and legal scholars has long been that the ruling is “so thoroughly discredited,” as Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a 2010 book, “that it is hard to conceive of any future court referring to it favorably or relying on it.”