Korematsu v. United States

Korematsu v. United States was one of four United States Supreme Court cases that dealt with the constitutionality of the Japanese internment during World War II. In its December 18, 1944 decision to uphold the internment, the Court argued forcefully that military necessity legitimates expansive federal government war powers, including those that curtail the civil liberties of specific racial groups.

Historical context

An internment camp in California Template:Photo

The December 7, 1941 attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor prompted widespread concern about the security of the United States' West Coast and the possibility of espionage by members of its large Japanese-American population. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded by issuing Executive Order (EO) 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War and his designated commanders to establish "military areas" as they see fit and exclude "any or all persons" from entering or remaining within them. The main result of Roosevelt's order was the relocation of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent from the West Coast into internment camps in the interior of the United States. A month later, Congress passed Public Law 503, which criminalized violations of military orders issued as a result of EO 9066.

Facts of the case

Persuant to EO 9066, on May 3, 1942, the U.S. army issued Civilian Exclusion Order Number 34, which instructed all persons of Japanese ancestry living in San Leandro, California to evacuate the area by the end of that week. Fred Korematsu, a California-born American citizen whose parents had emigrated from Japan in 1905, refused to comply with the exclusion order.

Korematsu was apprehended on May 30, 1942 and subsequently tried and found to be in violation of Public Law 503 by the Federal District Court for Northern California. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court ruling. Korematsu appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted certiorari on March 27, 1944. Oral arguments were heard on October 11, 1944.

Decision

On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, to affirm the lower courts' decisions and uphold the Japanese internment as a constitutional exercise of executive and legislative power.

Opinion of the Court

Justice Hugo Black wrote the opinion of the Court, which acknowledged at the outset that "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect," but concluded that "to cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue."

To arrive at this conclusion, the opinion relied heavily upon the ruling in a previous case, Hirabayashi v. United States, which challenged a curfew order that had been issued persuant to EO 9066. As in Hirabayashi, the Court maintained that it had no basis for rejecting military officials' determination that the exclusion order Korematsu was contesting was necessary due to the impossibility of quickly identifying and detaining disloyal individuals within the broader, and presumably largely loyal, Japanese-American community. To bolster this point, Black cited a number of congressional hearings in which the refusal of several thousand Japanese-Americans to take an oath of unqualified allegiance to the United States and requests for repatriation to Japan served as evidence that there existed at least some individuals within the Japanese-American community who posed a national security threat due to their loyalty to Japan.

The opinion also rejected the possibility that there had been two conflicting orders in play on the day that Korematsu was apprehended, and that he could not therefore be convicted for failing to heed the exclusion order. That is, while Public Proclamation No. 4 of March 27, 1942 had indeed stipulated that no Japanese-American leave the designated military area, such emigration was restricted only "until and to the extent that a future proclamation or order should so permit or direct." Exclusion Order No. 34 constituted just such a "future order"; as such, its requirement that Korematsu leave San Leandro overrode rather than contradicted Proclamation No. 4's requirement that he stay put.

Black further contended that, despite Korematsu's argument that the exclusion order must be considered as part and parcel of the government's entire relocation program, the exclusion order and the subsequent detentions were in fact two distinct policies, the constitutionality of which was to be evaluated separately. Thus, while the decision likened Korematsu's exclusion order to the curfew order that was contested in Hirabayashi, it contrasted it to the detention policy that was challenged in a third Japanese internment case that was decided the same day, Ex Parte Endo.

The opinion of the Court wraps up by confronting the objection that Korematsu centered on a "case of imprisonment of a citizen in a concentration camp solely because of his ancestry," which Justice Roberts raised in his dissenting opinion. Black eschewed the concentration camp appellation "with all the ugly connotations that term implies" and reiterated that the case dealt only with an exclusion order that was entirely justified due to military necessity:

Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and, finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders -- as inevitably it must -- determined that they should have the power to do just this.

Concurring and dissenting opinions

Justice Felix Frankfurter authored a short concurring opinion, which, as was Frankfurter's wont, made a stand for judicial restraint: "To find that the Constitution does not forbid the military measures now complained of does not carry with it approval of that which Congress and the Executive did. That is their business, not ours."

Three justices, Owen Roberts, Robert Jackson, and Frank Murphy each filed a separate dissenting opinion.

Justice Roberts disagreed with the Court's reliance on the Hirabayashi precedent, arguing that the facts of Korematsu's case suggest that the exclusion order he violated must be viewed as part and parcel of "an over-all plan for forceable detention." He also expounded upon the catch-22 created for Korematsu by the conflicting Proclamation No. 4 and exclusion orders:

The two conflicting orders, one which commanded him to stay and the other which commanded him to go, were nothing but a cleverly devised trap to accomplish the real purpose of the military authority, which was to lock him up in a concentration camp. The only course by which the petitioner could avoid arrest and prosecution was to go to that camp according to instructions to be given him when he reported at a Civil Control Center.

In other words, Korematsu's only non-criminal avenue for challenging his exclusion from San Leandro would have been to report for relocation to an internment camp and, once there, petition for a writ of habeas corpus, as had been done in the Endo case.

Justice Murphy's dissent, which opened with the assertion that the wartime exclusion of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast exceeded the bounds of constitutional power and fell into "the ugly abyss of racism," was especially scathing.

Aftermath

Today, this decision is widely criticized and denounced as a classic example of wartime encroachment on civil liberties. The Congress passed the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act to provide compensation to Japanese properties damaged during the "relocation". In 1980 the Congress opened an investigation to the internment program and a report titled "Personal Justice Denied" was written. The report condemned the "relocation" and the Korematsu court decision. In 2001, the PBS broadcast a Eric Paul Fournier film Of Civil Wrongs and Rights in memory of the Japanese internment and the Korematsu litigation. In 1998, Fred Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton; he died in 2005.

Tom Clark, the coordinator of the relocation program, was nominated to became a Supreme Court justice in 1949. He said he regretted his role in the Japanese internment and referred to it as one of his biggest mistakes. When Clark resigned from the Court in 1967, he was replaced by the first black Justice, Thurgood Marshall.