According to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, a society's legal system approaches ethical perfection to the extent that it treats people as ends rather than as means. Judged by this august standard of Kant's famous categorical imperative, the past year has not been a banner year for the American legal system-as recent publications illuminate earlier calamities. In a San Francisco courtroom recently, a federal district judge vacated the conviction and sentence of Fred Korematsu, one of more 110,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese aliens who were systematically excluded from their homes, farms, and businesses during the Second World War and herded into detention camps. The government of the United States justified this horrendous deprivation of civil liberties on the ground that Korematsu and other ethnic Japanese represented an obvious threat to the security of the nation. But in vacating Korematsu's conviction for defying the exclusion order, the federal judge took notice of new evidence that in 1942 attorneys for the United States had deliberately suppressed FBI and other intelligence reports refuting claims by the military that ethnic Japanese had engaged in acts of espionage and sabotage. The whole sad and dreary story of how Japanese Americans became scapegoats for our military frustrations and victims of our racial prejudice has been told by one of Korematsu's lawyers, Peter Irons, in his appropriately titled book, Justice at War.' The new book by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton on the Rosenberg atom spy case and a paperback edition of John Major's 1971 study of J. Robert Oppenheimer's hearing before the Personnel Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission will do very little to moderate the long-standing