Essay: Korematsu v United States

About halfway through World War II, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 (History Matters). This order granted the United States military the authority to exclude citizens of Japanese ancestry from areas deemed important to national defense and potentially susceptible to espionage. The military issued an order that banned “All Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien” (DeWitt) from certain designated zones along the West Coast stretching form Washington State to southern Arizona (Konkoly). Soldiers quickly set up interment camps to hold these Japanese Americans for the duration of the war. Fred Korematsu, an American born citizen of  Japanese descent refused to follow this order and stayed in his home in San Leandro, California. Following his conviction, he appealed, and his case reached the Supreme Court in 1944.
Korematsu claimed that this Executive Order violated his personals rights set aside in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment states that “no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law”. Fred Korematsu argued that by being forced into internment camps he was being deprived of his right to live freely without the due process of law. Korematsu was arrested for violating the order. The Supreme Court decided, based on the previous case of Hirabayashi v. United States, that Order 9066 was not based on racial prejudice, but rather based on the fear of an incident
similar to Pearl Harbor. (Korematsu v United States). A 6-3 majority on the Court upheld Korematsu’s conviction. This decision, written by Justice Hugo Black, was very controversial because it was the first time the Supreme Court ruled on racial discrimination based on the strict scrutiny standard. This means that the Supreme Court applied the strictest interpretation of the law to justify the use of Japanese internment camps as superior to individual rights (Korematsu v United States). Justice Hugo Black held that although “all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect” and subject to tests of “the most 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 can.” (Konkoly). This temporary segregation of Japanese Americans was deemed to be constitutional on the basis of military urgency.
The United States military argued that the loyalty of some of the Japanese Americans may still lay with their mother country, Japan, and not with the U.S. They deemed that separating the loyal from the disloyal was logistically unfeasible and therefore the Order had to apply to all Japanese Americans within the designated area. The Supreme Court looked at the United States’s stake in the war and national security against the presumed curtailment of the rights of a certain racial group and decided that the country’s security concerns superseded the United States Constitution’s promise of equal rights.
Justice Robert Jackson issued a fervent dissent in which he wrote “Korematsu … has been convicted of an act not commonly thought a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived.” (Cornell Law) He believed that the country’s wartime security concerns were not enough to strip Korematsu or any other citizen of their constitutionally protected civil rights. Jackson went on to admit that during times of war the military would likely maintain their ability to arrest citizens and that the judicial branch, holding no executive power, could do nothing to stop it. However he still fought the courts compliance with the military’s actions as he said “a judicial construction of the due process clause that will sustain this order is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself.” “A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. … But 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 order, the Court for all of time has validated the principle of racial discrimination. … The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of urgent need.” (Cornell Law) Jackson felt that by the Supreme Court siding with the military that they were creating a certain level of racial discrimination that would be deemed as acceptable in the future. Justice Owen Roberts also dissented in this case arguing that “…an Assembly Center was a euphemism for a prison” while Justice Frank Murphy, also dissenting, said that the internment of the Japanese was based upon “the disinformation, half-truths and insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese Americans by people with racial and economic prejudices.” (Konkoly)
The Supreme Court’s decision in Korematsu v United States has never been explicitly overturned yet it is still loudly criticized by civil libertarians and historians. The case is often cited for its assertion that “all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect.” A report issued by Congress in 1983 declared 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 monetary compensation, to the Japanese Americans interned during World War II. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest medal that can be awarded to a civilian during peacetime. It was not until the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger (dealing with the affirmative action policy at the University of Michigan Law School) that the Court again approved an instance of racial discrimination against the application of Black’s “rigid scrutiny” standard (Konkoly). Jackson’s dissent, though, reminds us of the difficult position the Court finds itself in when it looks at claimed violations of constitutional rights during times of war.