Brent Skorup, Cato Institute, has posted The Korematsu Era: The Restructuring of Government Power, 1942–1948:
This paper argues that the years 1942 to 1948 constitute a distinct constitutional episode—the “Korematsu Era”—in which the Supreme Court consolidated a new model of executive-centered governance under conditions of declared emergency. Rather than treating Korematsu as an isolated judicial failure, the paper situates it alongside Quirin, Wickard, NBC, Yakus, Oklahoma Press, and Shapiro as part of a broader structural shift. Across military, economic, communications, and administrative domains, the Court sustained expansive delegations of legislative authority and nationalized economic regulation, while sharply narrowing the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to accommodate administrative compulsion. This period of doctrinal consistency—the centralization of power in the executive—coincided with the years in which seven of the nine Justices were Roosevelt appointees, marking a rare moment of institutional alignment between the political branches and the judiciary. Although elements of this transformation trace to the New Deal, the paper argues that even in decisions not typically regarded as wartime cases—Wickard, NBC, and Shapiro—the wartime context helps explain the Court’s pronounced deference during this period. The administrative state, expansive commerce power, and deferential delegation jurisprudence that define modern constitutional law bear the imprint of this wartime consolidation.
--Dan Ernst
