Landmark Supreme Court Case · Civil liberties in wartime
Korematsu v. United States (1944)
- Decided
- 1944
- Vote
- 6–3
- Opinion
- Justice Hugo Black
- Constitutional provisions
Facts of the case
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 (1942). Military orders under it removed about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, from the West Coast and confined them in internment camps. Fred Korematsu, an American citizen born in California, refused to leave and was convicted.
The constitutional question
Did the exclusion order violate the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans?
The decision
No. The Court upheld the exclusion order as justified by "military necessity" during wartime. It said that classifications based on race are "immediately suspect" and subject to "the most rigid scrutiny," yet found this one acceptable.
The Court's reasoning
The majority deferred to military and executive judgments about the danger of espionage. Three justices dissented. Justice Frank Murphy called the order a fall "into the ugly abyss of racism."
Why it matters
It is now viewed as a grave injustice that sacrificed civil liberties to wartime fear. Korematsu's conviction was overturned in 1983. Congress apologized and paid reparations in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. In Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the Court stated that Korematsu "was gravely wrong the day it was decided."