US President Abraham Lincoln's request for an opinion on the suspension of the right to habeas corpus during the American Civil War eventually resulted in the decision in Ex parte Merryman (1861) of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, as a judge of the US Circuit Court for the District of Maryland: The US government explicitly referred to the maxim in its argument in the case by remarking (with an additional reference to Cicero) that "these [amendments of the Bill of Rights], in truth, are all peace provisions of the Constitution and, like all other conventional and legislative laws and enactments, are silent amidst arms, and when the safety of the people becomes the supreme law."
The erosion of citizens' rights during World War II was upheld by the US Supreme Court in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), a case that held that the application of curfews against members of a minority group was constitutional when the nation was at war with the country from which that group originated.
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.
In 2004, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia used this phrase to decry the plurality decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which upheld the detention of a US citizen as an enemy combatant without charge or suspension of habeas corpus: Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges.
It was also used in the 2010 movie The Conspirator by the character Joseph Holt when telling Frederick Aiken why his habeas corpus writ had been overridden by President Andrew Johnson to send Mary Surratt to be hanged.