In its more modern usage , the phrase has become a watchword about the erosion of civil liberties during wartime . In the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks , the maxim was aired and questioned in the media of the United States , with renewed force . The implication of the saying , as currently used , is in debate whether civil liberties and freedoms are subservient to a wartime nation 's duty of self-defense . In 1998 Chief Justice William Rehnquist , in '' All the Laws but One : Civil Liberties in Wartime '' suggested that " the least justified of the curtailments of civil liberty " were unlikely to be accepted by the courts in wars of the future : " It is neither desirable nor is it remotely likely that civil liberty will occupy as favored a position in wartime as it does in peacetime . But it is both desirable and likely that more careful attention will be paid by the courts to the basis for the government 's claims of necessity as a basis for curtailing civil liberty . ... The laws will thus not be silent in time of war , but they will speak with a somewhat different voice . " In 2004 , Justice Antonin Scalia used this phrase to decry the plurality decision in '' Hamdi v. Rumsfeld '' which , in his view , upheld the detention of a US citizen as an enemy combatant without charge or suspension of '' habeas corpus ''
September 11 attacks
September 11 attacks
Inter arma enim silent leges