It’s easy to talk about constitutional rights when things are calm. But what happens in moments of crisis, when fear is high and the stakes feel existential? That’s the test. And in 1944, the Supreme Court failed it.
Korematsu v. United States is one of the most infamous decisions in the Court’s history. It upheld the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II—a policy that was openly based on race.
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, fear swept across the U.S., especially along the West Coast. In response, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to exclude people from designated zones. In practice, this meant rounding up more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry (most of them U.S. citizens) and sending them to internment camps. No trials. No evidence of wrongdoing. Just ancestry.
Fred Korematsu, a young American-born citizen, refused to comply. He was arrested and convicted for defying the exclusion order. He challenged that conviction all the way to the Supreme Court.
The legal question was clear: Could the government forcibly relocate citizens based on race and still stay within the bounds of the Constitution?
The Court’s answer by a 6–3 vote was yes.
Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black acknowledged that racial classifications are “immediately suspect.” But he accepted the government’s argument that the exclusion order was a necessary security measure in wartime. He said this wasn’t about racial prejudice, but military judgment. The government didn’t have to prove that every Japanese American posed a threat, only that the threat was plausible.
But not everyone on the Court agreed. Justice Murphy called it “legalized racism.” Justice Jackson warned that the decision created a “loaded weapon” for future governments to use racial discrimination whenever fear took hold.
Justice Frankfurter, who concurred in the judgment, stood apart in a different way. He didn’t pretend the policy wasn’t racist. He didn’t rely on military expertise. Instead, he argued that the Constitution itself permitted it. The president and Congress, he said, had the authority to act in wartime, even if that meant racial classifications.
This was more than deference to the executive. It was a constitutional theory: that emergencies change the legal landscape, and that the judiciary has no business second-guessing war powers.
The Court’s decision in Korematsu was based on national security. But history has shown how flimsy those justifications were. Years later, we learned that the government had actively suppressed evidence contradicting its claims of Japanese American disloyalty.
The camps weren’t humane. Families lived in tarpaper barracks behind barbed wire. Their businesses were gone. Their lives uprooted. And it was all done with the blessing of the highest court in the land.
It wasn’t until 2018—more than 70 years later—that the Supreme Court finally said aloud what had long been obvious: Korematsu was “gravely wrong the day it was decided.”
But even as the Court disavowed Korematsu, it upheld a different policy—President Trump’s travel ban, which disproportionately affected Muslims—under the same logic of deference to national security.
So the question remains: How do we tell the difference between security and scapegoating? And what role should courts play in times of fear?
Korematsu isn’t just a case about the past. It’s a warning about the future.
The difference between security and scapegoating should be fairly easy to tell apart and in this case it is extremely easy to see the difference and the issues with the Court's reasoning. However, we are looking at this case more than 80 years later. The world has changed a lot and has become much more accepting of diversity than it was. We also are not facing direct attacks in our country during a time of world war. The Court did not do the job it was supposed to do when it made the decision in this case. It did the job the military and president wanted it do. Instead of being fair and neutral in times of fear, they caved under the pressure of not undermining the President's and military's decisions on how to handle war time situations. By doing this they unfortunately and unjustly created a precedent that would allow Courts to "legalize racism" so long as they could state a reason of security.
Reading the Korematsu case was very interesting because it shines a light on how each decision derives not from impartiality but rather from a place which very much reflects the political issues of the time. It appears that justices can often find a source to support their agenda as long as they have the numbers to back it up. While this is particularly relevant today, we can see how it has been the case for a long time. The majority opinion seems often to be written in dire terms where one cannot help but agree with their reasoning. In this case, they used Hirabayashi as precedent for upholding this issue, but Justice Roberts in his dissent notes that the basis is flimsy, as Hirabayashi was a much less severe instance and hardly comparable. In reading around the majority opinion it is obvious what the true motives are, but you'll never find them in the majority's opinion.