On February 17, 2022, the Harris County Robert W. Hainsworth Law Library, in conjunction with Stop Repeating History, will present a free CLE entitled, “80 Years Later: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration and Korematsu v. The United States.” More information and registration information will be forthcoming in early 2022. In the meantime, read below for an overview of the historical background and procedural history of the Korematsu v. The United States court case as context for the February 17th CLE.
Historical Timeline
December 7, 1941: Japan launches an attack on “the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, killing more than 2,300 Americans.”
December 8, 1941: President Franklin Roosevelt delivers his "Day of Infamy Speech" and asks Congress to declare war on Japan. That same day, Congress passes a joint resolution, S. J. Res. 116, approving President Roosevelt’s request.
February 19, 1942: President Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066, titled, “Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas,” “from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.”
March 2, 1942: “General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, divides parts of the West Coast into Military Area 1 and Military Area 2, from which people of Japanese ancestry would be excluded.”
March 18, 1942: The War Relocation Authority is established “to oversee the relocation of Japanese-Americans and relocation centers.”
March 21, 1942: Public Law 503 is enacted, “making it a crime to violate military orders issued pursuant to Executive Order 9066.”
March 24, 1942: “The first Civilian Exclusion Order is issued by the Army, giving families one week to prepare for removal from their homes.”
May 3, 1942: Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 is issued, “ordering exclusion of persons of Japanese ancestry from the area where the Korematsu family resided.”
May 30, 1942: Fred Korematsu is arrested for “failure to report to a relocation center.”
Procedural History of Fred Korematsu’s Court Case
September 8, 1942: Fred Korematsu is “found guilty by the District Court for the Northern District of California of remaining in the City of San Leandro, California, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 97a, 18 U.S.C.A. 97a, and the orders issued thereunder.” He is placed on probation for five years. (Korematsu v. The United States, 319 U.S. 432 (1943).)
February 19, 1943: The “Ninth Circuit hears oral argument from counsel for Korematsu and two other Japanese-Americans (Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi).”
June 1, 1943: The U.S. Supreme Court answers the certified question affirmatively, so that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals does have jurisdiction to hear Korematsu’s appeal of the district court’s ruling. (Korematsu v. The United States, 319 U.S. 432 (1943).)
December 2, 1943: The Ninth Circuit affirms Korematsu’s district court conviction from September 8, 1942. (Korematsu v. The United States, 140 F.2d 289 (9th Cir. 1943).)
February 2, 1944: “A petition for certiorari in Korematsu’s case is filed with the Supreme Court.”
March 27, 1944: The U.S. Supreme Court grants certiorari in Korematsu v. The United States.
October 11, 1944: The U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Korematsu v. The United States.
December 18, 1944: The U.S. Supreme Court affirms Korematsu’s conviction and upholds the validity of Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34. (Korematsu v. The United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).)
Overturned Conviction, Abrogation, and Reparations
According to a United States Courts webpage: “In 1983, a pro bono legal team with new evidence re-opened the 40-year-old case in a federal district court on the basis of government misconduct. They showed that the government’s legal team had intentionally suppressed or destroyed evidence from government intelligence agencies reporting that Japanese Americans posed no military threat to the U.S. The official reports, including those from the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, were not presented in court. On November 10, 1983, a federal judge overturned Korematsu’s conviction in the same San Francisco courthouse where he had been convicted as a young man.”
However, the holdings of Korematsu v. The United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), including the validity of Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, remained the “law of the land” until the case was abrogated in 2018 by Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ___, 138 S.Ct. 2392, 201 L.Ed.2d 775.
As a final note, on August 10, 1988, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 became law, in part to acknowledge and apologize for “the fundamental injustice of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of United States citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry during World War II.” The Act also made provisions for potentially pardoning those convicted of violating exclusion orders, as well as authorized the payment of $20,000 per eligible individual “for the restitution of any position, status, or entitlement lost in whole or in part because of any discriminatory act of the United States government against such individual which was based upon the individual's Japanese ancestry and which occurred during the evacuation, relocation, and internment period.”