12. Korematsu v. United States ruled internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War was constitutional
Born in Oakland, California, in 1919, Fred Korematsu was the third son of Japanese parents who had emigrated to the United States in 1905. Rejected by the U.S. Navy when called for military duty under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, Korematsu instead trained as a welder to contribute to the war effort. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Korematsu was fired from his place of employment for his racial heritage. Undergoing plastic surgery on his eyelids in an attempt to pass as a Caucasian, Korematsu unsuccessfully sought to evade capture and was forcibly interned by American authorities for the remaining duration of World War Two under Executive Order 9066.
Appealing his imprisonment, Korematsu was denied at every stage, with his case eventually reaching the United States Supreme Court in 1944. Ruling 6-3 against Korematsu, the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, asserted the need to protect the country against the possibility of espionage outweighed the rights of American citizens of Japanese descent and upheld Roosevelt’s executive order. Described as an “odious and discredited artifact of popular bigotry”, Korematsu’s conviction for failing to adhere to the exclusion order was ultimately voided by a Californian court in 1983 and the case was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court in 2018 in Trump v. Hawaii.