Scalia Does Not Speak for SCOTUS.

He speaks for himself, not the court as a whole.

Scalia said the nation’s highest court was wrong to uphold the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, but something similar could easily happen during a future conflict.

In a 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu for violating an order to report to an internment camp.

He also cited a Latin expression meaning, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

“Well of course Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students and faculty during a lunchtime Q-and-A session.

In case you haven't noticed, Scalia's brand of cautious jurisprudence seems to be getting less and less popular with the people... who ultimately employ him.

Oh I understand: he's got life tenure as a Justice...
But how long a lifetime? Are we landing many Scalia acolytes on the Court today? Nope.

I'm pretty sure the American people of today -- not the 1940s American people = more traditional, more unquestioningly accepting of authority, more homogeneous, more fearful of the unknown perhaps -- will not go along with locking up our Muslim neighbors, say, out of a quiet, easy cowardice.

We're America, and we've got a Constitution that our allies don't. Some of us still believe in it too, as the best guide we've got.*

Hasn't the past decade -- torture, assassination drones, Guantanamo internment, flooding guns into foreign countries while trying to regulate them here at home -- taught us that relying on such methods is not all that effective in securing peace and building a peaceful shared world?

Look at Israel's long-term security as an example; consider the fate of the Boers in South Africa. That way does not work.

We're not so fearful in America, and plenty have guns now, to defend themselves if anyone starts sorting us up by ethnic groups, or distinguishing between citizens of different religions or nationalities to collectively punish. Plus, the whole 'blended identity' nature of families today means you'd have to determine which percentage of a gene stock or bloodline someone has to lock them up...

Who is a Muslim?
Who is a Jew?
(What distinguishes 'white Hispanic' from 'dark Hispanic' for that matter, and whose job would be determining that for segregation or lockdown measures? The military? Census records? No.)

No fear. Not gonna happen here. No going back to those days, quietly.

I do like that Justice Scalia continues to give public talks and run his mouth like this: it just ensures the need for more and more 'diversity' on the Court, and the rejection of highly intelligent minds like his, that are already advertising they would fail us, the American people, in our time of greatest need.

Coraje.

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* That assumes it's a 'living document' of course -- not mortal and brittling, not stuck in time -- whose core principles, properly and intelligently, even creatively applied, can get us through the worst of days... It evolves secularly as new issues unknown in the founding days arise, or it can be interpreted that way perhaps more easily, say, than the catechism teachings of non-secular traditional religions...