Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), was the Supreme Court decision that upheld, 6-3, the wartime exclusion of Japanese Americans from designated military zones on the West Coast. The Court affirmed Fred Korematsu’s criminal conviction for refusing to leave his Oakland home under a military order issued after Pearl Harbor. It became one of the most criticized rulings in American legal history, and in 2018 the Court itself declared it “gravely wrong the day it was decided.”
The Order Korematsu Was Convicted Of Violating
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, giving the Secretary of War authority to designate military areas and exclude anyone from them. Approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, were ultimately forced from their homes. General John L. DeWitt, commanding the Western Defense Command, issued a series of civilian exclusion orders targeting people of Japanese ancestry. Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 covered part of Alameda County, California, and required every person of Japanese descent in the area to report to a civil control station by early May 1942.
Congress backed the executive action with Public Law 503 on March 21, 1942, making it a federal crime to violate any military order issued under Executive Order 9066. That statute was the basis for prosecuting Fred Korematsu.
Who Fred Korematsu Was
Korematsu was a 23-year-old American citizen born and raised in Oakland. He had worked as a shipyard welder in the defense industry until he was fired after Pearl Harbor because of his Japanese ancestry. When the exclusion orders came, he chose to stay. Police arrested him on a street corner in San Leandro in late May 1942. A federal district court in San Francisco convicted him under Public Law 503 and sentenced him to five years of probation, after which he was sent to an assembly center in San Bruno.
The American Civil Liberties Union represented him on appeal. The Ninth Circuit upheld the conviction, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The constitutional question was whether the government could single out an entire ethnic group for removal from their homes based only on ancestry. Korematsu’s lawyers argued the exclusion order violated the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee, since no evidence suggested Korematsu personally posed any threat.
What the Supreme Court Held
Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion. The ruling announced a new legal standard that has outlived the decision itself: “all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect” and must be subjected to “the most rigid scrutiny.” That was the Court’s first clear statement of what would become strict scrutiny for racial classifications.
Having announced that standard, the majority found the government had met it. The justices accepted the military’s claim that the threat of espionage and sabotage on the West Coast created an urgent need, and that commanders could not quickly separate loyal citizens from potential threats. The Court deferred heavily to military judgment about security risks.
Black was careful to limit the holding. The Court, he wrote, was ruling only on the exclusion order itself, not on the broader detention program. Whether the government could hold people indefinitely in relocation centers was a separate question not before the Court. The majority also insisted the case was about military necessity, not racial prejudice, a characterization the dissenters flatly rejected.
The Three Dissents
Justice Frank Murphy called the exclusion order a “legalization of racism” and said it fell “into the ugly abyss of racism.” He compared the treatment of Japanese Americans to “the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy.” Murphy argued the military had offered no credible evidence that Japanese Americans as a group posed a genuine threat, and that individual loyalty hearings were the proper answer.
Justice Robert Jackson focused on the damage the ruling would do to the legal system. He acknowledged that military commanders might sometimes need to take unconstitutional actions in genuine emergencies, but argued the Court should never ratify those actions as constitutional. Once a judicial opinion validates racial discrimination by finding it consistent with the Constitution, he warned, “the principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” The military order would expire with the emergency. A Supreme Court opinion endorsing it would last forever.
Justice Owen Roberts dissented on more procedural grounds. He pointed out the impossible bind Korematsu faced. Stay home and violate the exclusion order; report as instructed and be detained indefinitely. The government was punishing him for refusing to submit to imprisonment without trial.
The Evidence the Government Hid From the Court
The full story didn’t emerge for nearly four decades. In the 1980s, researcher Peter Irons and archivist Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga discovered documents showing the government had deliberately withheld evidence from the Supreme Court that undermined its own case.
The key suppressed document was a January 1942 report by Lt. Kenneth Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Ringle concluded that “the entire ‘Japanese problem’ has been magnified out of its true proportion” and recommended handling it “on the basis of the individual, regardless of citizenship, and not on a racial basis.” Naval intelligence itself believed mass exclusion was unnecessary. Reports from the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission also contradicted General DeWitt’s claims about Japanese Americans engaging in offshore signaling and other subversive activity.
Solicitor General Charles Fahy, who argued the government’s case, was warned by his own colleagues that failing to disclose the contradictory evidence “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” Fahy chose not to alert the Court. A draft footnote acknowledging the contrary evidence was replaced with vague language. In 2011, then-Solicitor General Neal Katyal issued a public confession of the misconduct, stating simply: “The duty of candor wasn’t met.”
The 1983 Ruling That Cleared Korematsu Personally
Armed with the newly discovered evidence, Korematsu’s legal team filed a petition for a writ of coram nobis, a rare procedure used to correct fundamental errors in a criminal case after conviction is final. On November 10, 1983, Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the Northern District of California vacated the conviction.
Judge Patel found that “the government knowingly withheld information from the courts when they were considering the critical question of military necessity.” Her opinion documented how the Justice Department had presented a “selective record” to the Supreme Court, omitting intelligence from the Navy, FBI, and FCC that directly contradicted the military’s justification for exclusion.
The coram nobis ruling cleared Korematsu the man but did not overturn the Supreme Court’s 1944 precedent. The two operate on different tracks. Korematsu’s criminal record was wiped clean; the case bearing his name technically remained on the books as a Supreme Court decision.
Where the Case Stands Today
Congress addressed the underlying policy in 1988 with the Civil Liberties Act, which formally apologized for the internment and found it was driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” rather than genuine military necessity. Congress also found that not a single documented act of espionage or sabotage by a Japanese American had justified the mass exclusion.
The Supreme Court itself finally spoke to the 1944 decision in Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ___ (2018). Although that case involved a travel ban rather than Japanese American exclusion, Chief Justice John Roberts used the opinion to state plainly: “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution.'” The quoted language came from Justice Jackson’s original dissent. A decision that had stood for 74 years as a warning about what courts can get wrong under pressure was, at last, formally repudiated by the Court that issued it.