Korematsu v. United States · ¶55
The judicial test of whether the Government, on a plea of military necessity, can validly deprive an individual of any of his constitutional rights is whether the deprivation is reasonably related to a public danger that is so “immediate, imminent, and impending” as not to admit of delay and not to permit the intervention of ordinary constitutional processes to alleviate the danger. United States v. Russell, 13 Wall. 623, 627-8; Mitchell v. Harmony, 13 How. 115, 134-5; Raymond v. Thomas, 91 U. S. 712, 716. Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, banishing from a prescribed area of the Pacific Coast “all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien,” clearly does not meet that test. Being an obvious racial discrimination, the order deprives all those within its scope of the equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. It further deprives these individuals of…Read in context ›
U. S. Reports, bound volume
U. S. Reports, volume 323, at 214 (Library of Congress) · transcription: Caselaw Access Project
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