page_title: Korematsu v. United States
section_title: Murphy's dissent
hierarchical_section_title: Korematsu v. United States / Decision / Murphy's dissent
caption_attribution_description: English: Newest member of U.S. Supreme Court, Frank Murphy, former Atty. General, Feb. 1940
context_page_description: Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, was a landmark United States Supreme Court case upholding the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast Military Area during World War II. The decision has widely been criticized, with some scholars describing it as "an odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry" and as "a stain on American jurisprudence". Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion in the 2018 case of Trump v. Hawaii that the Korematsu decision was explicitly repudiated.
  In the aftermath of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the War Department to create military areas from which any or all Americans might be excluded. Subsequently, the Western Defense Command, a United States Army military command charged with coordinating the defense of the West Coast of the United States, ordered "all persons of Japanese ancestry, including aliens and non-aliens" to relocate to internment camps.
context_section_description: Justice Frank Murphy issued a vehement dissent, saying that the exclusion of Japanese "falls into the ugly abyss of racism", and resembles "the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy." Murphy argued that collective punishment for Japanese Americans was an unconstitutional response to any disloyalty that might have been found in a minority of their cohort.  He also compared the treatment of Japanese Americans with the treatment of Americans of German and Italian ancestry, as evidence that race, and not emergency alone, led to the exclusion order which Korematsu was convicted of violating: 
  "I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution."
   
  Justice Murphy's two uses of the term "racism" in this opinion, along with two additional uses in his concurrence in Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railway Co., decided the same day, are among the first appearances of the word "racism" in a United States Supreme Court opinion. The first appearance was in Justice Murphy's concurrence in Ex parte Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944). The term was also used in other cases, such as Duncan v. Kahanamoku, 327 U.S. 304 (1946) and Oyama v. California, 332 U.S. 633 (1948). It then disappeared from the court's lexicon for 18 years—it reappeared in Brown v. Louisiana, 383 U.S. 131 (1966). It did not appear in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), even though that case did talk about racial discrimination and interracial marriages.
caption: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy
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