Korematsu v. United States

Korematsu v. United States was a landmark Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans to be held in internment camps during World War II. In a 6–3 decision made on December 14, 1944, the Court came down on the side of the government, ruling that the order was constitutional in an opinion written by Associate Justice Hugo Black. The ruling reflected a long-standing precedent that the president and Congress could take extraordinary actions to protect the nation during times of crisis, especially wartime.

The executive order followed the surprise Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, which brought the United States into World War II. The attack devastated the US Pacific Fleet. It also unleashed a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment and paranoia across the country. Some government officials and everyday Americans were convinced that the attack could not have occurred without action by spies and saboteurs. The order was officially designed to prevent any future espionage or sabotage by creating exclusion zones around military areas. In the aftermath of the executive order, on May 19, 1942, authorities began to forcibly relocate Japanese Americans to camps.

The Korematsu decision is universally considered one of the Court's worst moments. While Black upheld the internment of Fred Korematsu on the ground that the need to protect the American people outweighs the need to protect the rights of any individual or any racial group, his pronouncement that “all legal restrictions which curtail the rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect” contains the seeds of a vital aspect of the Court's increasing emphasis on civil rights, the “strict scrutiny” test developed to assess when government action violates equal protection. Meanwhile, in a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson argued that the executive order violated the Constitution by allowing the government to discriminate along racial lines.