Korematsu v. United States

Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), is a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the exclusion of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast Military Area during World War II, an exclusion that led to the internment of Japanese Americans, and which is now widely regarded as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the creation of military exclusion areas, Fred Korematsu, a 23-year-old Japanese American, refused to leave the exclusion zone and challenged the order as violating the Fifth Amendment; in a majority opinion, Associate Justice Hugo Black held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed the rights of Americans of Japanese ancestry, while dissenting justices called the exclusion racially discriminatory. Korematsu's conviction was voided by a California district court in 1983 after evidence emerged that the government had suppressed a report finding no evidence Japanese Americans were spying for Japan, and the Supreme Court itself overruled Korematsu in Trump v. Hawaii (2018).