Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that the application of curfews against members of a minority group were constitutional when the nation was at war with the country from which that group's ancestors originated. The case arose out of the issuance of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had authorized military commanders to secure areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded", and Japanese Americans living in the West Coast were subject to a curfew and other restrictions before being removed to internment camps. The plaintiff, Gordon Hirabayashi, was convicted of violating the curfew and had appealed to the Supreme Court. Yasui v. United States was a companion case decided the same day. Both convictions were overturned in coram nobis proceedings in the 1980s.
Background
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, American public opinion initially stood by the large population of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast or at least did not openly question their loyalty to the United States. Six weeks later, however, public opinion had turned against Japanese Americans, as the press and other Americans became nervous about the potential for fifth column activity. Though the administration (including President Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) dismissed rumors of Japanese American espionage on behalf of the Japanese war effort, pressure mounted upon the Administration, as the tide of public opinion turned against Japanese Americans.
On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, as head of the Western Defense Command, to exclude certain persons from "military areas," regardless of their ancestry or country of citizenship. Over the course of several weeks, DeWitt issued several public proclamations that first imposed a curfew upon Japanese American citizens and resident "aliens" of Japanese descent. (The Issei, or first-generation immigrants, were prohibited from naturalized citizenship as members of an "unassimilable" race.) Later orders confined Japanese Americans to Military Area No. 1, which included Seattle, where Hirabayashi lived. On May 3, 1942, DeWitt issued an order requiring Japanese Americans in the Seattle area to report to assigned assembly points for "evacuation" to isolated inland camps. (At the time, the terms "relocation centers," "internment camps," and "concentration camps" were used interchangeably.)
Case
The defendant, Gordon Hirabayashi, was a University of Washington student who was accused of violating the curfew and exclusion order, designated a misdemeanor by Public Law 503, a congressional statute introduced to enforce Executive Order 9066 and any subsequent military orders. Hirabayashi turned himself in for disobeying the curfew at the FBI's Seattle office on May 16, 1942 and announced that he planned to disobey the impending removal order.
After his arrest, he was approached by an acquaintance, liberal Washington State Senator Mary Farquharson, who suggested that he make his case a test case. She organized a support committee for Hirabayashi and served as its secretary-treasurer as the committee raised funds for his legal defense. (This support was important in advancing the case, as the ACLU refused to support Hirabayashi.)
He was held in King County Jail for five months, until his trial on October 20. The jury deliberated for just ten minutes before it returned two guilty verdicts, one for the curfew violation and another for the exclusion order, and Hirabayashi was sentenced to consecutive 30-day jail terms. (After requesting to serve his time in an outdoor labor camp rather than prison, Judge Lloyd Black handed down two 90-day sentences, to be served concurrently at the Catalina Federal Honor Camp, outside Tucson, Arizona.)
Hirabayashi's lawyers appealed the conviction, and after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco declined to rule on the case, it eventually landed in the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department expected a legal challenge to all of the three substantive elements of Roosevelt's and DeWitt's directives to Japanese Americans: curfew, exclusion, and internment. The administration, particularly the Department of Justice and Francis Biddle, sought out test cases that it could use to establish favorable precedent and prepared itself for a case that could challenge the entire internment policy.