The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday overruled a 1944 decision that upheld a military order requiring the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which is largely regarded as one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in its history.
In an opinion upholding the third iteration of President Trump’s travel ban Tuesday, the Supreme Court said that Korematsu v. United States is overruled and issued a strong denunciation of the World War II-era decision.
“Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
But Roberts also rejected any comparisons between Korematsu and the travel ban case.
“Whatever rhetorical advantage the dissent may see in doing so, Korematsu has nothing to do with this case,” he wrote. “The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of presidential authority. But it is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.”
Roberts was responding to a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who drew parallels between Korematsu and the case challenging Trump’s executive order, which restricted travel to the U.S. for foreign nationals from seven countries, five of which have Muslim-majority populations.
An eighth country with a majority-Muslim population, Chad, was included in the proclamation but removed from the list in April.
Sotomayor praised the court’s condemnation of the Korematsu decision, saying it was “laudable and long overdue,” but she said it does not make the ruling in the travel ban case “acceptable or right.”
“By blindly accepting the government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another,” she wrote.
Sotomayor was joined in her dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Korematsu case arose after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order after the attack on Pearl Harbor that required Japanese-Americans to leave their homes and relocate to internment camps.
A California man, Fred Korematsu, chose not to obey the order and was subsequently arrested. He challenged the executive order, saying it was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, however, upheld Roosevelt’s order.
