Korematsu v. United States

Summary

Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, decided on 18 December 1944, upheld the criminal conviction of an American citizen for remaining in his home area after the Army ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry to leave it. After Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 of 19 February 1942 let military commanders designate areas from which any person might be excluded, and on 21 March Congress made violating their orders a crime. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt imposed a curfew and then exclusion orders; Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 required persons of Japanese descent to leave the San Leandro area of California after 9 May 1942. Fred Korematsu, a twenty-three-year-old welder born in Oakland, stayed, was arrested at the end of May, and was convicted. About 110,000 to 120,000 people, most of them citizens, were removed from the West Coast and held in assembly and relocation centers. Korematsu argued that he had been punished solely for his ancestry, without any finding about his loyalty, and that the orders forbidding him both to leave and to remain were in effect a command to report for detention. The government answered that military authorities, facing possible invasion and unable to separate the loyal from the disloyal quickly, had reasonably judged that exclusion was needed to prevent espionage and sabotage, and that Congress had authorized them to act. The Court affirmed by a vote of six to three. Justice Hugo Black declared that legal restrictions on a single racial group are immediately suspect and must receive the most rigid scrutiny, but held that pressing military necessity justified this one, relying on the 1943 curfew decision in Hirabayashi v. United States. He declined to pass on detention. Justice Frankfurter concurred, reasoning that the war power covers measures reasonably taken to wage war and that upholding them is not approving them. Justice Roberts dissented on the ground that the conflicting orders amounted to punishing a citizen for refusing to submit to imprisonment. Justice Murphy argued that the exclusion rested on assumptions about an entire group rather than on any showing of military necessity, and that individual hearings had been feasible. Justice Jackson contended that courts cannot weigh military judgments, but that a court which validates such an order lends the principle a lasting authority. The library text contains Black's opinion, Frankfurter's concurrence, Jackson's full dissent and excerpts of the Roberts and Murphy dissents, without footnotes. In 1983 Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the federal district court in San Francisco vacated Korematsu's conviction by writ of coram nobis, finding that the government had withheld evidence contradicting its claims of military necessity. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 issued a formal apology and paid $20,000 to each surviving person who had been detained. In Trump v. Hawaii (2018) Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the Court that Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided and had been overruled in the court of history.

Top Lessons

• Rigid scrutiny announced and applied

  Black's opinion is the origin of the phrase that racial classifications are immediately suspect and require the most rigid scrutiny, a standard later used to strike down many laws. In Korematsu itself, however, the Court found the standard satisfied by the military's judgment. Students can examine how a strict test can be stated in principle and applied with deference in practice.

• Deciding only the question presented

  The majority insists that only exclusion, not detention, is before it, and on the same day decided in Ex parte Endo that a concededly loyal citizen could not be held in a relocation center. Roberts and Jackson argue that the orders cannot be separated so neatly. The dispute shows how framing the question can shape the answer.

• Courts, war and the limits of review

  The opinions offer three different views of the judiciary in wartime: Frankfurter's that military measures reasonable for waging war are constitutional, Murphy's that courts must test whether military discretion has been overstepped, and Jackson's that courts cannot evaluate military necessity and should therefore refuse to lend the law's authority to such orders.

• Guilt that is personal

  Jackson points out that Korematsu was convicted for an act that would have been lawful had his parents been born in Germany or Italy, and invokes the Constitution's ban on corruption of blood for treason. The principle that guilt attaches to individual conduct, not ancestry, runs through the dissents.

• How a nation revisits a decision

  Korematsu was never formally overruled in the ordinary way, yet its standing changed through a 1976 presidential proclamation, a congressional commission, a 1983 vacatur of the conviction, a 1988 statute of apology and redress, and a 2018 statement of the Court. Each branch of government took part in that history.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The opinions concern war powers, equal protection and due process; they contain no discussion of health or medical conditions in the assembly or relocation centers.