In the supreme court’s decision in korematsu v. united states the court said that korematsu quizlet

Thirty years ago next month, justice delayed finally arrived for a pioneer of racial equality, Fred Korematsu.  The most famous challenger of the Japanese-American internment had his conviction overturned as a result of information showing the government had withheld vital evidence from the both the Supreme Court and Mr. Korematsu’s defense team, led by CCE founder Charles Horsky.

Fred Korematsu was an American citizen of Japanese descent, living in California in 1942 when Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 was promulgated by the War Department, ordering all persons of Japanese descent in California to report to relocation camps.  He refused, and was arrested and convicted under a statute which created criminal sanctions for civilians who refused military orders.  The ACLU took on his case, which reached the Supreme Court in 1944.  In a 6-3 decision, the Court upheld Korematsu’s conviction.  In addition to its historical significance, the case had great legal impact because it was the first time the Court created a separate standard of review for a law utilizing a suspect classification, stating that laws which discriminate on the basis of race “are immediately suspect” and must be subjected to “the most rigid scrutiny.”  In addition, the dissent of Justice Murphy is still considered to be one of the strongest denunciations of racism to come from the Court in the 20th Century.

Despite losing his case, history vindicated Mr. Korematsu.  In 1983, as a result of evidence that the Solicitor General suppressed reports showing that the War Department exaggerated the threat posed by the Japanese population, a writ of coram nobis was granted, overturning Korematsu’s conviction.  Mr. Horsky later said that he also felt justified by the writ, since he had doubted the government’s evidence and had always been troubled about losing Korematsu’s case.

The spirit of justice and civic engagement that led Charles Horsky to fight for Fred Korematsu later led him to fight for the interests of the District, and eventually to create CCE.  CCE was recently given access to Mr. Horsky’s private library by his daughter Maggie Nunez, and his firm, Covington & Burling LLP.  CCE thanks both Ms. Nunez for allowing CCE access to her father’s books, and Covington & Burling for their assistance and their continued involvement on our board.

Reproduction courtesy of the Library of Congress

A 6-3 majority on the Court upheld Korematsu's conviction. Writing for the majority, 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."

In Korematsu's case, the Court accepted the U.S. military's argument that the loyalties of some Japanese Americans resided not with the United States but with their ancestral country, and that because separating "the disloyal from the loyal" was a logistical impossibility, the internment order had to apply to all Japanese Americans within the restricted area. Balancing the country's stake in the war and national security against the "suspect" curtailment of the rights of a particular racial group, the Court decided that the nation's security concerns outweighed the Constitution's promise of equal rights.

Justice Robert Jackson issued a vociferous, yet nuanced, dissent. "Korematsu ... has been convicted of an act not commonly thought a crime," he wrote. "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." The nation's wartime security concerns, he contended, were not adequate to strip Korematsu and the other internees of their constitutionally protected civil rights.

In the second half of his dissent, however, Jackson admitted that ultimately, in times of war, the military would likely maintain the power to arrest citizens -- and that, possessing no executive power, there was little the judicial branch could do to stop it. Nonetheless, he resisted the Court's compliance in lending the weight of its institutional authority to justify the military's actions, and contended that the majority decision struck a "far more subtle blow to liberty" than did 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."

Justice Owen Roberts also dissented in the case, arguing that a relocation center "was a euphemism for prison," and that faced with this consequence Korematsu "did nothing." Also dissenting, Justice Frank Murphy harshly criticized both the majority and the military order, writing 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."

The Court's decision in Korematsu, loudly criticized by many civil libertarians at the time and generally condemned by historians ever since, has never been explicitly overturned. Indeed, it is frequently cited for its assertion that "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect." However, 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 reparations -- to the Japanese Americans interned during the war. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Significantly, not until the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger (dealing with the affirmative action policy at the University of Michigan Law School) did the Court again approve an instance of racial discrimination against the application of Black's "rigid scrutiny" standard. Jackson's dissent, though, reminds us of the difficult position the Court finds itself in when it assesses claimed violations of constitutional rights in times of war.

	AUTHOR'S BIO
	Toni Konkoly is a production assistant at Thirteen/WNET.

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