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Book Review: The Alien and the Asiatic in American Law
Cohen, Felix
Cohen, Felix
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Abstract
This treatise on the two chief outcasts of our constitutional system, the alien and the Asiatic, is a timely probing of the depth of our American democracy. Its list of legal atrocities constitutionally committed upon Americans or would-be Americans who did not have the foresight to be born in the proper places has all the macabre fascination of old ethnology books which recount the horrors found by missionaries among benighted peoples lacking properly supported agencies of civilization and true religion. Today, more than ever, such a study has meaning even for native-born Americans of whitest ancestry. For none of us can be sure of rights which are denied to the meanest member of society. And since the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States' has held that American citizens of a feared or hated stock may be taken from their homes and put behind barbed wire without notice of charges, indictment, jury trial, or other opportunity to be heard in self-defense, all of our civil rights are subject to forfeiture if nations or races from which any of us are descended become feared or hated.