On August 8, 2019, Professor John Q. Barrett spoke on a plenary session panel, “And Then They Came for Us: The Perils of Silence,” at the American Bar Association annual meeting in San Francisco.
The program began with a showing of the award-winning documentary, “And Then They Came for Us,” on U.S. incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
L-R: Professors Barrett & Bannai, ABA President Bob Carlson, & Mr. Minami
Following the film, Professor Barrett spoke about lawyers’ conduct and inaction in Nazi Germany, about the Japanese-American cases in the U.S. Supreme Court during World War II, and about the work of lawyers at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders following the war. (For a press report on the panel, click here).
Professor Barrett’s fellow panelists were San Francisco lawyer Dale Minami and Seattle University law professor Lorraine Bannai. They spoke about their 1980s representation of Fred Korematsu in the litigation that won the writ of coram nobis that negated his 1942 conviction for violating the military order that excluded him, because he was Japanese-American, from the U.S. west coast.
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