Yick Wo v. Hopkins

Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that a prima facie race-neutral law administered in a prejudicial manner infringed upon the right to equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Background
Yick Wo was a laundry facility owned by Lee Yick, an immigrant from China who moved to  San Francisco in 1861. Yick ran the laundry for 22 years and held a license from the Board of Fire Wardens and a certificate of inspection from the city health officer when, in 1880, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance making it illegal to operate a laundry in a wooden building without a permit from the Board.

Yick was denied a permit to continue operating his laundry in a wooden building. He refused to close down his business and was convicted for violating the ordinance. He was fined ten dollars and imprisoned for refusing to pay the fine. After he was imprisoned, he sued for a writ of habeas corpus.

Of 320 similar laundries in San Francisco at the time, 240 were owned by Chinese. Although most of the city's wooden building laundry owners applied for a permit, only one permit was granted of the two hundred applications from Chinese, while only one out of approximately eighty non-Chinese applicants were denied a permit.

San Francisco ordinance
Order No. 156, passed May 26, 1880

"SEC. 1. It shall be unlawful, from and after the passage of this order, for any person or persons to establish, maintain, or carry on a laundry within the corporate limits of the city and county of San Francisco without having first obtained the consent of the board of supervisors, except the same be located in a building constructed either of brick or stone.

SEC. 2. It shall be unlawful for any person to erect, build, or maintain, or cause to be erected, built, or maintained, over or upon the roof of any building now erected or which may hereafter be erected within the limits of said city and county, any scaffolding without first obtaining the written permission of the board of supervisors, which permit shall state fully for what purpose said scaffolding is to be erected and used, and such scaffolding shall not be used for any other purpose than that designated in such permit.

SEC. 3. Any person who shall violate any of the provisions of this order shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment in the county jail, not more than six months, or by both such fine and imprisonment."

Issue
The central issue of the case was the scope of the Equal Protection Clause. The 14th amendment requires that "no state...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Arguments
The state argued that the ordinance was strictly one out of concern for safety, as laundries of the day often needed very hot stoves to boil water for laundry, and indeed laundry fires were not unknown and often resulted in the destruction of adjoining buildings as well.

The petitioner pointed out that prior to the new ordinance, the inspection and approval of laundries in wooden buildings had been left up to fire wardens. Wo's laundry had never failed an inspection for fire safety. Moreover, the application of the prior law focused only on laundries in crowded areas of the city, while the new law was being enforced on isolated wooden buildings as well. The law also ignored other wooden buildings where fires were common—even cooking stoves posed the same risk as those used for laundries.

Opinion of the Court
The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Matthews, found that the Chinese laundry owners were protected from discriminatory state action by the equal protection clause even if they were not American citizens:

"These provisions are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality."

The Court struck down the ordinance. While the ordinance was not discriminatory against a racial or ethnic group in its text, the discriminatory enforcement and intent to close down Chinese-owned laundries infringed upon their "fundamental rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" by destroying "their harmless and useful occupation, on which they depend for a livelihood." The Court said the deprivation of property was arbitrary and unconstitutional because the 14th amendment guarantee of equal protection applies to "all persons within the territorial jurisdiction", including non-citizens. As Justice Anthony Kennedy has explained, the holding of Yick Wo is about purposeful discrimination:

"The holding of Yick Wo was that a law that's administered with an evil eye or an unequal hand violates [a person's] right to equal protection."

Legacy
Even after the Yick-Wo decision Supreme Court case law continued to apply a Dred Scott-like standard excluding Chinese from the protections of the constitution in immigration cases. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, restricted the entry of Chinese immigrant laborers and subsequent legislation prevented Chinese who left the United States from re-entering. The Chinese Exclusion Case upheld the revocation of previously issued certificates of return.

The Court in Fong Yue wrote that Yick Wo was a case about "the power of a State over aliens continuing to reside within its jurisdiction". The Fong Yue Ting decision did not go as far as overturning Yick Wo, but Yick Wo did not limit the federal power to deport or remove that were at issue in the later Chinese Exclusion Case and Fong Yue.

In Wong Kim Ark v. United States the Court recognized that the 14th amendment right to jus soli citizenship applied for Chinese born in the United States based on Yick Wo. The federal government's argument was about the text of the 14th amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." The government argued that the jurisdiction requirement was not merely territorial, but required citizens be politically subject to the laws of the United States. Writing for the majority Justice Horace Gray relied heavily on the Yick Wo precedent to reaffirm the principle that 14th amendment guarantee of equal protection does not have a heightened subjecthood requirement for Chinese people:

"Chinese persons, born out of the United States, remaining subjects of the Emperor of China, and not having become citizens of the United States, are entitled to the protection of, and owe allegiance to the United States, so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here; and are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” in the same sense as all other aliens residing in the United States."

Yick Wo is cited in Hirabayashi v. United States to recognize that: "Distinctions between citizens solely based because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. For that reason, legislative classification or discrimination based on race alone has often been held to be a denial of equal protection." However, the US Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Gordon Hirabayashi, the Japanese American who tested the curfew law and refused to register for the forced internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II.

In San Francisco there is a public school named Yick Wo Alternative Elementary School in honor of Yick Wo.

During his confirmation hearing Anthony Kennedy's written answers to Senator Joseph Biden included a quote from Flores v. Pierce, a 9th Circuit decision he wrote applying Yick Wo to uphold a judgment against municipal officials who had a "history of racially motivated activity" against Hispanics:

"One of the first cases interpreting the equal protection clause stands for the rule, among others, that the effect of a law may be so harsh or adverse in its weight against a particular race that an intent to discriminate is not only a permissible inference but also a necessary one. Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 In the instant case, the disparate effect of the action on Mexican-Americans was so compelling that the effect may approach, if it does not reach, the demonstration of an intent to discriminate that was made in Yick Wo v. Hopkins."