Korematsu v. United States

The Court upheld the wartime exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, a decision now widely repudiated.

Overview

Fred Korematsu, an American citizen of Japanese descent, refused to leave his California home under military orders issued pursuant to Executive Order 9066 and was convicted. Justice Hugo Black, for a 6-3 majority, stated that racial classifications are immediately suspect and subject to the most rigid scrutiny but deferred to military judgment about the risk of espionage. Justices Murphy, Jackson, and Roberts dissented sharply. In 1983 a federal court vacated Korematsu's conviction after evidence emerged that the government had suppressed contrary intelligence, and in Trump v. Hawaii in 2018 Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided.