Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1945

Korematsu v. United States

323 U.S. 214 | 65 S. Ct. 193 | 89 L. Ed. 194 | 1944 U.S. LEXIS 1341

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Takeaway

In short, this case upheld wartime racial exclusion as a claimed military necessity, a ruling later repudiated by the Supreme Court as gravely wrong.

Background

Fred Korematsu, a United States citizen of Japanese descent, remained in San Leandro, California, after Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 required persons of Japanese ancestry to leave the designated military area. The order was issued under Executive Order 9066 and a 1942 Act of Congress that made knowing violations of military-area restrictions a misdemeanor. No allegation was made that Korematsu himself was disloyal.

A federal district court convicted Korematsu for knowingly remaining in the prohibited area. The Ninth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari because the case presented a major constitutional question concerning wartime exclusion orders directed at a racial group.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the federal government could constitutionally exclude persons of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens, from designated West Coast military areas during World War II.

Holding

Yes. The Court upheld Korematsu's conviction because, at the time of the order and his violation, the exclusion was a valid exercise of the war power directed at preventing espionage and sabotage.

Reasoning

The Court began by stating that legal restrictions curtailing the civil rights of a single racial group are “immediately suspect” and must receive the “most rigid scrutiny.” Still, it held that pressing public necessity, though never racial antagonism, can justify such a restriction.

Relying heavily on Hirabayashi v. United States, which had sustained a Japanese-American curfew order under the same statutory, executive, and military framework, the Court concluded that exclusion bore a definite and close relationship to preventing espionage and sabotage in a threatened coastal area.

The Court deferred to the military and congressional judgment that there were disloyal members within the population of Japanese ancestry, that their number and identity could not quickly be determined, and that immediate individual segregation of loyal from disloyal persons was impracticable. Because the military deemed curfew inadequate, it could temporarily exclude the entire group as a military necessity.

The Court acknowledged that exclusion from one's home was a severe deprivation and said that excluding large groups of citizens absent a direct emergency would be inconsistent with basic governmental institutions. But it concluded that the perceived danger of invasion and the military's responsibility to defend the coast justified the measure when it was adopted.

Issue #2

Whether Korematsu's exclusion conviction could be invalidated by the asserted unlawfulness of the assembly-center and relocation-center detention program.

Holding

No. The Court held that the exclusion order could be considered separately from later orders requiring reporting to and remaining in assembly or relocation centers.

Reasoning

The Court treated the evacuation program as a series of distinct legal requirements: leaving the exclusion area, reporting to an assembly center, and remaining under military control in a relocation center. A violation of each requirement could constitute a separate offense.

Korematsu had been convicted only for remaining in the prohibited area after the exclusion order took effect. He had not been convicted of failing to report to, or remain in, an assembly or relocation center, so the Court declined to decide the legality of those later restraints.

The Court pointed to Ex parte Endo, decided the same day, as illustrating that the validity of exclusion and the validity of detention after exclusion were different questions. In the Court's view, deciding the lawfulness of detention in Korematsu's criminal case would go beyond the issues presented by the pleadings and evidence.

Issue #3

Whether military orders placed Korematsu under contradictory commands by forbidding him both to leave and to remain in the military area.

Holding

No. The Court concluded that the relevant orders did not subject Korematsu to punishment regardless of whether he left or stayed.

Reasoning

A March 27 order had prohibited persons of Japanese ancestry from leaving the area, but it expressly remained effective only until a future order permitted or directed departure. The May 3 exclusion order was that future order: it directed persons of Japanese ancestry to leave the designated area by May 9.

Thus, on May 30, the date charged in the information, the operative order regarding Korematsu's presence in the area was the exclusion order forbidding him to remain. Because he knowingly violated that order, the Court found no due process problem based on contradictory commands.

Concurrences

Justice Frankfurter

Reasoning

Justice Frankfurter agreed that the exclusion order was valid and that its instructions were not contradictory. In his reading, Korematsu had to leave Military Area No. 1 by the prescribed method—reporting to the assembly center—and Hirabayashi's reasoning supported criminal enforcement of that order.

He emphasized that the Constitution's war powers are as much a part of the Constitution as its protections applicable in peacetime. An action that would be unlawful in peace may be constitutionally permissible if it is a reasonably expedient military precaution in the context of war.

For Frankfurter, an authorized military measure within the constitutional war power could be enforced by Congress through the civilian criminal courts. He stressed, however, that finding the measure constitutional did not mean that the Court approved it as a matter of policy; judging its wisdom was for Congress and the Executive, not the judiciary.

Dissents

Justice Roberts

Reasoning

Justice Roberts viewed the exclusion order and detention program as a single, indivisible scheme. In reality, he argued, Korematsu was convicted for refusing to submit to imprisonment in an assembly or relocation center solely because of his ancestry, despite the absence of any inquiry into his loyalty.

He traced the sequence of military orders to show that Korematsu was first forbidden to leave Military Area No. 1 and later forbidden to remain there unless he entered an assembly center. The only practical way to avoid criminal liability, Roberts reasoned, was to surrender to military custody and confinement.

Roberts rejected the majority's effort to isolate the exclusion order from detention. The orders created a trap: Korematsu could not freely leave the area, could not stay in his home, and could avoid prosecution only by entering what Roberts called a concentration camp. He concluded that a citizen need not submit to allegedly unlawful imprisonment before challenging the scheme and would have reversed the conviction.

Justice Murphy

Reasoning

Justice Murphy concluded that excluding all persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast was an unconstitutional racial discrimination, describing it as a descent into “the ugly abyss of racism.” Although courts should respect genuine military judgments in wartime, he maintained that military discretion remains subject to judicial review when martial law has not been declared.

In Murphy's view, a deprivation of constitutional rights based on military necessity must be reasonably related to an immediate, imminent, and impending danger that does not permit ordinary constitutional processes. The blanket exclusion order failed that test because it imposed sweeping burdens on an entire racial group without individual hearings or proof of individual disloyalty.

He found that the military justifications relied on racial and sociological generalizations, misinformation, and insinuations rather than reliable evidence that Japanese Americans as a class threatened national security. The record, he argued, showed no adequate basis for treating ancestry as a proxy for disloyalty.

Murphy also stressed that months had passed between Pearl Harbor and the exclusion orders, that ordinary investigative agencies had not been shown incapable of addressing espionage and sabotage, and that no person of Japanese ancestry had been charged with espionage or sabotage while free after Pearl Harbor. The government could have conducted individual loyalty determinations rather than imposing collective punishment.

Justice Jackson

Reasoning

Justice Jackson stressed that Korematsu was a native-born, loyal American citizen whose presence in his home state became a crime solely because of his ancestry. The Constitution rests on the principle that guilt is personal rather than inherited, yet the exclusion order made race—not conduct, intent, or proven disloyalty—the basis for criminal liability.

Jackson distinguished the Army's operational authority from the judiciary's duty to apply constitutional law. A military commander may take expedient steps in a war emergency, even steps that courts are institutionally unable to evaluate as military matters. But, he argued, a civil court cannot transform such a military expedient into constitutional law by enforcing it as a criminal rule.

He warned that courts lack the evidence and institutional competence to independently test military claims of necessity, and therefore will tend to accept military assertions at face value. That made judicial approval especially dangerous: it would constitutionalize racial discrimination rather than leave it as a temporary military action subject to political and historical judgment.

Jackson warned that the Court's validation of the exclusion order would function like a “loaded weapon,” available whenever an official invoked a plausible claim of urgent need. Hirabayashi, he argued, had approved only a limited curfew, but the majority now used that precedent to validate expulsion, detention, and potentially indefinite confinement. He would reverse the conviction and discharge Korematsu.