Japanese American Incarceration: Official Supreme Court Volume Containing the Landmark Korematsu v. United States Decision Upholding Wartime Racial Exclusion, 1944

Korematsu v. United States Japanese American Internment

First Edition

[Japanese American] [Civil Rights] [World War II] United States Reports, Volume 323, Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term, 1944. Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1945. First edition. 845 pages. Large hardcover volume in original government cloth binding; issued without dust jacket.

Official Supreme Court volume containing Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), one of the most consequential and widely condemned decisions in the history of American constitutional law. Decided during World War II, the case upheld the conviction of Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, a Japanese American citizen who refused to comply with the military exclusion order requiring people of Japanese ancestry to leave designated areas of the West Coast. The decision became the principal judicial symbol of the federal government's wartime exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans and of the constitutional failure to protect individual rights in the face of racial prejudice and claims of military necessity. Following Executive Order 9066, military authorities imposed exclusion orders that ultimately resulted in the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens. Korematsu deliberately violated the exclusion order and challenged his conviction on constitutional grounds. His case reached the Supreme Court alongside other challenges to the government's wartime treatment of Japanese Americans.

Writing for the 6–3 majority, Justice Hugo Black acknowledged that legal restrictions directed at a single racial group were “immediately suspect” and subject to the “most rigid scrutiny,” yet nevertheless concluded that the exclusion order was justified by what the Court accepted as wartime military necessity. The ruling did not expressly uphold the constitutionality of detention itself; rather, it sustained the exclusion order under which Korematsu had been convicted. That distinction is legally important, although the decision became inseparable historically from the larger program of Japanese American removal and incarceration.

The dissents were extraordinary in their condemnation of the government's action. Justice Frank Murphy characterized the exclusion policy as falling into the “ugly abyss of racism,” while Justice Robert Jackson warned of the lasting danger created when the Supreme Court validated an unconstitutional military measure, writing that the principle would thereafter lie “about like a loaded weapon” available to future authorities claiming urgent necessity. Decades later, evidence emerged demonstrating that government officials had withheld or suppressed information undermining claims that Japanese Americans represented a military threat. Korematsu's conviction was vacated by a federal district court in 1983 through a writ of coram nobis, although that proceeding did not itself overturn the Supreme Court's 1944 precedent.

The Supreme Court finally repudiated Korematsu by name in Trump v. Hawaii (2018). Although the Court upheld the presidential travel restrictions at issue in that separate case, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that Korematsu “was gravely wrong the day it was decided” and stated that the decision “has no place in law under the Constitution.” The repudiation came nearly seventy-four years after the original ruling contained in the present volume. As the official contemporary printing of the Supreme Court's decisions for the October 1944 term, this volume preserves Korematsu within its original judicial context rather than as a later reprint or retrospective account. The case stands as a defining document in the history of Japanese American incarceration, wartime civil liberties, racial discrimination, and the limits of judicial protection during periods of national crisis.
Original cloth binding with previous owner's stamp and library card to front pastedown. Binding sound and text clean. Overall very good condition.

Item #20929

Price: $785.00