The Supreme Court case Korematsu vs. United States determined that the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II was indeed constitutional (legal). The judges voted 6-3 in favor of the American government.
What is the significance of the Korematsu case?
The Supreme Court explicitly repudiated the Korematsu decision in 2018 via their review of Trump v. Hawaii. However, the Korematsu opinion remains significant: it was the first instance of the Supreme Court applying the strict scrutiny standard to racial discrimination by the government.
Was Executive Order 9066 constitutional Quizlet?
Executive Order 9066 was constitutional. Executive Order 9066; U.S. Const. amend. V Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court to uphold the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II.
What did Chief Justice Roberts say about Korematsu v Hawaii?
Chief Justice Roberts, in writing the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii, stated that Korematsu v.
What was the Supreme Court decision on Japanese-American internment?
"Supreme Court finally rejects infamous Korematsu decision on Japanese-American internment". CNN. Retrieved June 26, 2018. Biskupic, Joan (April 18, 2004). "Prisoners test legal limits of war on terror using Korematsu precedent". USA Today. Levy, Robert A.; Mellor, William H. (2008). "Civil Liberties Versus National Security".
What did the Supreme Court decide in Korematsu v United States regarding the internment quizlet?
Ruled 6-3 against Korematsu and upheld that the order was constitutional and legal.
What was the result of Korematsu v United States quizlet?
Ruled 6-3 against Korematsu and upheld that the order was constitutional and legal; overturned decades later and was given a medal by President Bill Clinton.
What did the Korematsu Supreme Court decision do quizlet?
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II regardless of their citizenship.
What did the Supreme Court decide in Korematsu v United States regarding the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry living in the US?
In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the wartime internment of American citizens of Japanese descent was constitutional.
What was the decision in Korematsu v United States?
Supreme Court Ruling Majority: Conviction affirmed. The Supreme Court ruled that the evacuation order violated by Korematsu was valid, and it was not necessary to address the constitutional racial discrimination issues in this case.
What did the Supreme Court decide in Korematsu?
The Court ruled in a 6 to 3 decision that the federal government had the power to arrest and intern Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu under Presidential Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Which amendments did Korematsu violate?
Fred Korematsu took his case to the federal court, ruled against him; appealed and took case to the Supreme Court on the basis that Order 9066 violated the 14th and 5th Amendments.
Why did Fred Korematsu refuse to leave his home?
Fred Korematsu believed sending people to internment camps and punishing them based on their race was discrimination. Korematsu refused to leave his home because of this.
What are the 14th and 5th amendments?
14th: Citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws (must treat citizens the same). 5th: Right to life, liberty, and property
Why did Japanese Americans go to internment camps?
Japanese-Americans were forced to internment camps on the west coast of the United States due to the suspicion of espionage. The United States Government rounded up 120,000 people with a Japanese ancestry for detention.
What was the Korematsu v. United States case?
214 (1944), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case upholding the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II. The decision has widely been criticized, with some scholars describing it as "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry" ...
How did Korematsu challenge his conviction?
Korematsu challenged his conviction in 1983 by filing before the United States District Court for the Northern District of California a writ of coram nobis , which asserted that the original conviction was so flawed as to represent a grave injustice that should be reversed. As evidence, he submitted the conclusions of the CCWRIC report as well as newly-discovered internal Justice Department communications demonstrating that evidence contradicting the military necessity for the Executive Order 9066 had been knowingly withheld from the Supreme Court. Specifically, he said Solicitor General Charles H. Fahy had kept from the Court a wartime finding by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Ringle Report, that concluded very few Japanese represented a risk and that almost all of those who did were already in custody when the Executive Order was enacted. While not admitting error, the government submitted a counter-motion asking the court to vacate the conviction without a finding of fact on its merits. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel denied the government's petition, and concluded that the Supreme Court had indeed been given a selective record, representing a compelling circumstance sufficient to overturn the original conviction. She granted the writ, thereby voiding Korematsu's conviction, while pointing out that since this decision was based on prosecutorial misconduct and not an error of law, any legal precedent established by the case remained in force.
Why was Korematsu arrested?
Korematsu argued that Executive Order 9066 was unconstitutional and that it violated the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment was selected over the Fourteenth Amendment due to the lack of federal protections in the Fourteenth Amendment. He was arrested and convicted.
Why was Korematsu's conviction voided?
Korematsu's conviction was voided by a California district court in 1983 on the grounds that Solicitor General Charles H. Fahy had suppressed a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence that held that there was no evidence that Japanese Americans were acting as spies for Japan.
What command ordered all Japanese to relocate to internment camps?
Subsequently, the Western Defense Command , a United States Army military command charged with coordinating the defense of the West Coast of the United States, ordered "all persons of Japanese ancestry, including aliens and non-aliens" to relocate to internment camps.
What did Frank Murphy say about the Japanese exclusion order?
Justice Frank Murphy issued a vehement dissent, saying that the exclusion of Japanese "falls into the ugly abyss of racism", and resembles "the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy." Murphy argued that collective punishment for Japanese Americans was an unconstitutional response to any disloyalty that might have been found in a minority of their cohort. He also compared the treatment of Japanese Americans with the treatment of Americans of German and Italian ancestry, as evidence that race, and not emergency alone, led to the exclusion order which Korematsu was convicted of violating:
Why was Korematsu not excluded from the military?
Black wrote that: "Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race", but rather "because the properly constituted military authorities ... decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast" during the war against Japan. Dissenting justices Frank Murphy, Robert H. Jackson, and Owen J. Roberts all criticized the exclusion as racially discriminatory; Murphy wrote that the exclusion of Japanese "falls into the ugly abyss of racism" and resembled "the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy."
What court did Korematsu appeal?
Korematsu’s attorneys appealed the trial court’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals, which agreed with the trial court that he had violated military orders. Korematsu asked the Supreme Court of the United States to hear his case. On December 18, 1944, a divided Supreme Court ruled, in a 6-3 decision, that the detention was a “military necessity” ...
What was Korematsu convicted of?
Lower court held: Korematsu was convicted of violating an exclusion order by the military.
What did Justice Jackson say about the exclusion order?
Justice Jackson called the exclusion order “the legalization of racism” that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He compared the exclusion order to the “abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy. He concluded that the exclusion order violated the Fourteenth Amendment by “fall [ing] into the ugly abyss of racism.”
What did the exclusion order violate?
He called the exclusion order "the legalization of racism” that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Why was Korematsu arrested?
On May 30, 1942, about six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested Korematsu for failure to report to a relocation center. After his arrest, while waiting in jail, he decided to allow the American Civil Liberties Union to represent him and make his case a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the government’s order. Korematsu was tried in federal court in San Francisco, convicted of violating military orders issued under Executive Order 9066, given five years on probation, and sent to an Assembly Center in San Bruno, CA.
How long did it take for Japanese to move to detention camps?
The order set in motion the mass transportation and relocation of more than 120,000 Japanese people to sites the government called detention camps that were set up and occupied in about 14 weeks.
When was the Korematsu case reopened?
In 1983, a pro bono legal team with new evidence re-opened the 40-year-old case in a federal district court on the basis of government misconduct. They showed that the government’s legal team had intentionally suppressed or destroyed evidence from government intelligence agencies reporting that Japanese Americans posed no military threat to the U.S. The official reports, including those from the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, were not presented in court. On November 10, 1983, a federal judge overturned Korematsu’s conviction in the same San Francisco courthouse where he had been convicted as a young man.
Overview
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to uphold the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II. The decision has been widely criticized, with some scholars describing it as "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry", and as "a stain on American jurisprudence". Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly repudiated the Korematsu decision in his ma…
Background
In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the report of the First Roberts Commission, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the War Department to create military areas from which any or all Americans might be excluded, and to provide for the necessary transport, lodging, and feeding of persons displaced from such areas. On March 2, 1942, the U.S. Army Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, commander of the Wester…
Decision
The decision of the case, written by Justice Hugo Black, found the case largely indistinguishable from the previous year's Hirabayashi v. United States decision, and rested largely on the same principle: deference to Congress and the military authorities, particularly in light of the uncertainty following Pearl Harbor. Justice Black further denied that the case had anything to do with racial prejudice:
Subsequent history
In 1980, Congress established a commission to evaluate the events leading up to the issuance of Executive Order 9066 and accompanying military directives and their impact on citizens and resident aliens, charging the commission with recommending remedies. Discussing the Korematsu decision in their 1982 report entitled Personal Justice Denied, this Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CCWRIC) concluded that "eac…
See also
• Anticanon
• Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
• Ex parte Endo
• Hirabayashi v. United States
Further reading
• Biskupic, Joan (April 18, 2004). "Prisoners test legal limits of war on terror using Korematsu precedent". USA Today.
• Levy, Robert A.; Mellor, William H. (2008). "Civil Liberties Versus National Security". The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. New York: Sentinel. pp. 127–142. ISBN 978-1-59523-050-8.
External links
• Works related to Korematsu v. United States at Wikisource
• Text of Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944) is available from: CourtListener Findlaw Google Scholar Justia Library of Congress
• Galloway Jr., Russell W. (1989). "Basic Equal Protection Analysis". Santa Clara Law Review. 29 (1). Retrieved February 8, 2021.