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The Robert H. Jackson Center will host the next installment of its 25 Years of Asking Questions lecture series, “Who Belongs in America?" on Thursday, Oct. 8, from 6 to 7 p.m.
The program will feature Robert L. Tsai, law professor and Harry Elwood Warren Memorial Scholar at the Boston University School of Law. Tsai served during the 2024-25 academic year as a Laurance Rockefeller visiting Faculty fellow at Princeton University’s University Center for Human Values. A scholar of constitutional culture and democratic development, he is the author of “Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All” (2024). Tsai clerked for the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Tsai’s talk will explore how fear, race and national security have shaped who is recognized as fully American, drawing on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States. The discussion will connect that history to present-day debates over immigration and constitutional boundaries, and to Justice Robert H. Jackson’s own warnings against racial discrimination.
“Questions we once thought were settled, who belongs and what protections they’re owed, are back at the center of our national conversation,” said Kristan McMahon, president of the Robert H. Jackson Center. “Justice Jackson understood that those questions never stay settled for long, which is exactly why we need scholars like Robert Tsai to help us think through them clearly.”
Tsai says that America has entered a new age of nationalism, as charismatic figures backed by social movements seek to remake the world in their own image. Jackson had much to say about this phenomenon from his own era of rising nationalism.
"As he wrote in his Korematsu dissent, ‘if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable.’ Fred Korematsu was undoubtedly a citizen, yet was presumed guilty by his ancestry. Today the terms of citizenship itself are being contested again: who belongs, who can be removed, and how harshly. Americans are being tested once more, and we have to decide whether we are willing to pay the wages of the new nationalism,” Tsai said.
The 25 Years of Asking Questions series is presented as part of the Jackson Center’s 25th anniversary programming in 2026. The series is sponsored by Southern Chautauqua Federal Credit Union.
The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.roberthjackson.org/event/25yaq-who-belongs-in-america/ or call 716-483-6646.