The Court acknowledged that legal restrictions based on race are immediately suspect and demand careful judicial review. The Court stated that racial classifications should be subjected to the most rigid scrutiny, because they are typically rooted in prejudice rather than legitimate necessity.

Nevertheless, the majority accepted the government’s argument that wartime posed extraordinary dangers and that preventing sabotage and espionage was a compelling interest. It treated the exclusion order not as hostility toward Japanese Americans but as a security measure tied to circumstances of war.

The Court framed the policy as a temporary military exclusion rather than racial punishment. It gave broad deference to the military’s judgment about urgency and risk, emphasizing that courts are not institutionally equipped to second-guess military assessments in the midst of war.

Critically, the Court did not require concrete individualized evidence that Korematsu or other Japanese Americans posed actual threats. The policy applied broadly and categorically. The Court accepted this on the theory that wartime conditions sometimes require action based on generalized risk assessments.

Dissenters argued that the exclusion order was fundamentally unconstitutional because it imposed severe burdens on citizens based solely on ancestry. The dissents described the policy as legalization of racism and warned against validating discriminatory treatment in the name of wartime expediency.

In later constitutional history, Korematsu became widely condemned as wrongly decided and as an example of judicial failure to protect civil liberties. While the case historically articulated early strict-scrutiny language, it also stands as a warning about excessive deference and the dangers of racial classifications justified by claims of emergency.