A 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which upheld sending 100,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps, was “wrong” but very likely will happen again in wartime, according to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Scalia was teaching a class at the University of Hawaii when he was asked about the case of Korematsu v. the United States, a ruling in which two liberal giants, Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, voted for internment.

“Well, of course, Korematsu was wrong,” said Scalia. “And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.”

As reported by The Associated Press, the conservative justice quoted a Latin saying, which translates as “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

“That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot,” said Scalia. “That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time of war. It’s no justification, but it is reality.”

The 1944 case involved a young California man, Fred Korematsu, and University of Washington law student Gordon Hirabayashi.

“This was a very very difficult, troublesome decision,” Justice Douglas, who grew up in Yakima, said years later. He claimed to have had “great doubts” but wrote a concurring opinion.

A large number of Japanese-American farmers on Bainbridge Island found themselves sent to a dusty camp in Minidoka, Idaho. A Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial sits near the dock where they were sent into enforced exile.

The convictions of Korematsu and Hirabayshi were vacated years after the war. Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Once his legal appeals were vacated, Hirabayshi was considered such a threat to national security that he was allowed to make his own way to an internment camp near Tucson, Arizona.

The camp site, 4,000 feet up Mount Lemmon, is now a picnic and camping area in the Coronado National Forest, named after Gordon Hirabayshi.