ABSTRACT
In Korematsu, the Court was presented with the question of, among other things, the appropriate degree of deference due to the executive branch during a time of war.1 In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that led to the removal of thousands of Japanese Americans from their homes to internment camps in various states across the West. The order derived from the military’s purported belief that persons of Japanese ancestry posed a threat to the nation’s security and that their wholesale roundup was necessitated by a supposed inability to identify particular individuals actually posing such a risk. Korematsu, an American-born citizen subject to the order, refused to leave his home and was later convicted for his failure to comply.
