What Was The Background Of The Korematsu Vs. United States Court Case?

Photo of Japanese Americans at a government-run internment camp during World War II.
In Korematsu v. The states, the Supreme Court held that the wartime internment of American citizens of Japanese descent was constitutional. Above, Japanese Americans at a regime-run internment campsite during Earth War Two.

Reproduction courtesy of the Library of Congress

Korematsu v. United States (1944)

Early in Earth State of war Ii, on Feb 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Guild 9066, granting the U.S. military the power to ban tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry from areas deemed disquisitional to domestic security. Promptly exercising the power so bestowed, the military machine and so issued an gild banning "all persons of Japanese ancestry, both conflicting and non-alien" from a designated littoral surface area stretching from Washington Country to southern Arizona, and hastily set up internment camps to hold the Japanese Americans for the elapsing of the war. In defiance of the gild, Fred Korematsu, an American-born citizen of Japanese descent, refused to leave his home in San Leandro, California. Duly convicted, he appealed, and in 1944 his case reached the Supreme Court.

A vi-iii majority on the Courtroom upheld Korematsu'south conviction. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black held that although "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect" and bailiwick to tests of "the about rigid scrutiny," not all such restrictions are inherently unconstitutional. "Pressing public necessity," he wrote, "may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never tin."

In Korematsu's case, the Courtroom accepted the U.S. military's argument that the loyalties of some Japanese Americans resided not with the United States only with their ancestral country, and that considering separating "the disloyal from the loyal" was a logistical impossibility, the internment order had to apply to all Japanese Americans within the restricted expanse. Balancing the state's stake in the state of war and national security against the "suspect" curtailment of the rights of a particular racial group, the Court decided that the nation'due south security concerns outweighed the Constitution'due south hope of equal rights.

Justice Robert Jackson issued a vociferous, yet nuanced, dissent. "Korematsu ... has been convicted of an act non commonly thought a crime," he wrote. "Information technology consists only of being present in the state whereof he is a denizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived." The nation'south wartime security concerns, he contended, were not adequate to strip Korematsu and the other internees of their constitutionally protected civil rights.

In the 2nd one-half of his dissent, however, Jackson admitted that ultimately, in times of war, the military machine would likely maintain the power to arrest citizens -- and that, possessing no executive power, at that place was little the judicial branch could do to stop information technology. Nonetheless, he resisted the Court'southward compliance in lending the weight of its institutional authority to justify the armed forces's actions, and contended that the majority decision struck a "far more subtle accident to liberty" than did the club itself: "A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. ... Only once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an club, the Court for all of time has validated the principle of racial discrimination. ... The principle so lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the paw of whatever potency that can bring forward a plausible claim of urgent need."

Justice Owen Roberts also dissented in the instance, arguing that a relocation centre "was a euphemism for prison," and that faced with this consequence Korematsu "did nil." Besides dissenting, Justice Frank Murphy harshly criticized both the majority and the military club, writing that the internment of the Japanese was based upon "the disinformation, half-truths and insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese Americans past people with racial and economic prejudices."

The Court's decision in Korematsu, loudly criticized by many civil libertarians at the fourth dimension and by and large condemned past historians always since, has never been explicitly overturned. Indeed, it is oft cited for its assertion that "all legal restrictions which curtail the ceremonious rights of a unmarried racial grouping are immediately suspect." Nevertheless, a report issued by Congress in 1983 alleged that the decision had been "overruled in the court of history," and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 contained a formal apology -- as well as provisions for budgetary reparations -- to the Japanese Americans interned during the state of war. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Significantly, non until the 2003 case Grutter five. Bollinger (dealing with the affirmative activity policy at the University of Michigan Law School) did the Courtroom again approve an instance of racial discrimination against the application of Black's "rigid scrutiny" standard. Jackson's dissent, though, reminds us of the hard position the Court finds itself in when it assesses claimed violations of constitutional rights in times of war.