From Open Source Defense:

It’s easy to point to moments where the Supreme Court spectacularly discarded people’s rights — Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, Wickard v. Filburn, Korematsu v. U.S., etc. etc. — as the thing that allowed a terrible chain of events. But did they allow the events, or were they caused by those same events? In the case of, say, Korematsu, you had a country that was willing to force everyone on the west coast with Japanese ancestry into camps. Would that country have been stopped by a Supreme Court that in the midst of it all piped up to say, “Hey everyone, you can’t imprison people for being Japanese, ok?” And more to the point, would such an environment produce a Supreme Court that would say that?