During World War II, western Japanese Americans were forced to move into relocation camps by Presidential Executive Order 9066. This order and congressional statutes gave the military authority to exclude citizens of Japanese ancestry from areas that were deemed critical to national defense and potentially vulnerable to espionage. Fred Korematsu was a Japanese man who decided to remain in San Leandro, California and knowingly violate Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the U.S. Army. He was arrested and convicted.

In the United States Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944) the Court was asked: Did the President and Congress go beyond their war powers by implementing exclusion and restricting the rights of Americans of Japanese descent?

The Court sided with the government in ruling that the Japanese American Internment was not unconstitutional. They held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Korematsu's rights. Justice Black argued that compulsory exclusion, though constitutionally suspect, is justified during circumstances of "emergency and peril."

On January 19, 1983, Korematsu challenged the earlier decision with a filing for a writ of coram nobis because the government knowingly filed incorrect information in the case. As a result, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the Federal District Court in San Francisco overturned the previous conviction of violating the exclusion order on November 10, 1983. In January of 1998, President Bill Clinton named Korematsu a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases

External links

• Full text of the decision courtesy of Findlaw.com