Takahashi v. Fish and Game Comm'n, 334 U.S. 410 (1948), was a test case brought by Japanese-American fishermen before the United States Supreme Court to challenge California state legislation aimed at preventing them from returning to fishing occupations they worked in before their mass removal and internment during World War II.

[2] Torao Takahashi came from Japan to the United States and became a resident of Terminal Island in Los Angeles County, California in 1907.

Prior to 1943 California issued commercial fishing licenses to all qualified persons without regard to alienage or ineligibility to citizenship.

In 1942, while the United States country was at war with Japan, Takahashi and other California residents of Japanese ancestry were forcibly interned under military orders.

In 1943, during the period of war and internment, an amendment to the California Fish and Game Code was adopted prohibiting issuance of a license to any "alien Japanese.

Takahashi, an alien ineligible for citizenship, brought an action for mandamus in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, California, to compel the Commission to issue him a commercial fishing license.

It held that lawful alien inhabitants of California, despite their ineligibility to citizenship, were entitled to engage in the vocation of commercial fishing on the high seas beyond the three-mile belt on the same terms as other lawful state inhabitants, and that the California code provision denying them this right violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Court held that California had a proprietary interest in fish in the ocean waters within three miles of the shore, and that this interest justified the State in barring all aliens in general and aliens ineligible to citizenship in particular from catching fish within or without the three-mile coastal belt and bringing them to California for commercial purposes.

333 U.S. 853, "to review this question of importance in the fields of federal-state relationships and of constitutionally protected individual equality and liberty".

A California statute barring issuance of commercial fishing licenses to persons "ineligible to citizenship," which classification included resident alien Japanese and precluded such a one from earning his living as a commercial fisherman in the ocean waters off the coast of the State, held invalid under the Federal Constitution and laws.

Justice Murphy, joined by Rutledge, expressed agreement with these views, but thought that the statute should also be condemned as being the direct outgrowth of antagonism toward persons of Japanese ancestry and as having no relation whatever to any constitutionally cognizable interest of California.