The vagaries of consent
Justice Hugo Black's Majority Opinion: "It should
be noted, to begin with, that all legal restrictions which curtail the civil
rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not
to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say
that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny.
Pressing public necessity
may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions, racial antagonism
never can."
Justices Owen J.
Roberts, Frank Murphy, and Robert H. Jackson dissented. |
Korematsu v. United States 323 U.S. 214
(1944) A case concerning the constitutionality of
Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps
during World War II regardless of citizenship. In a 6–3 decision, the Court
sided with the government, ruling that the exclusion order was
constitutional. Six of eight Roosevelt appointees sided with Roosevelt.
The opinion, written by Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, held that the need
to protect against espionage outweighed
Toyosaburo Korematsu's individual rights, and the rights of Americans
of Japanese descent. (The Court limited its decision to the validity of the
exclusion orders, adding, "The provisions of other orders requiring persons
of Japanese ancestry to report to assembly centers and providing for the
detention of such persons in assembly and relocation centers were separate,
and their validity is not in issue in this proceeding.")
Korematsu v. United States
has been very controversial. Korematsu's conviction for evading internment
was overturned on November 10, 1983, after Korematsu challenged the earlier
decision by filing for a writ of coram
nobis. In a ruling by Judge Marilyn Hall
Patel, the United States District Court for the Northern District of
California granted the writ (that is, it voided Korematsu's original
conviction) because in Korematsu's original case, the government had
knowingly submitted false information to the Supreme Court that had a
material effect on the Supreme Court's decision. The Korematsu
decision has not been explicitly overturned, although in 2011 the Department
of Justice filed official notice, conceding that it was in error, thus erasing the case's value as precedent
for interning citizens. However, the Court's opinion remains significant
both for being the first instance of the Supreme Court applying the strict
scrutiny standard to racial discrimination by the government and for being
one of only a handful of cases in which the Court held that the government
met that standard.
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