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 .

Contents

• 1 Background

• 2 San Francisco ordinance

• 3 Issue

• 4 Arguments

• 5 Opinion of the Court

• 6 Legacy

• 7 See also

• 8 References

• 9 External links

Background

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Yick Wo (Chinese : 益和; Jyutping : jik1 wo4)[_citation needed
_] was a laundry facility owned by Lee Yick, an immigrant from China who moved to San Francisco in 1861. : 964  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 without issue. 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.

Under the new ordinance, Yick was granted a license in 1884 to operate his laundry facility in the wooden building where he was located. The laundry was located at 349 Third Street in what is now known as the SoMa neighborhood. Because of changes in street layout after the 1906 earthquake, the exact location where Lee Yick’s laundromat once was is the corner of Third and Harrison street, now an empty parking lot.

Yick's application for renewal of his permit in June 1885 was denied, not allowing him to continue operating his laundry in a wooden building. When his original permit expired in October 1885 he was required by law to shut down. However, he refused to close down his business and was convicted for violating the ordinance . He was fined ten dollars ($333.62 in 2025) and imprisoned for refusing to pay the fine. When Sheriff Peter Hopkins arrested Lee Yick, he booked him under the name Yick Wo, mistakenly assuming this name from the name displayed on Yick’s laundry. After he was imprisoned, on August 24, 1885, he petitioned the California Supreme Court for a writ of _habeas corpus _.

Of 320 laundries operated in wooden buildings, in San Francisco at the time, over 200 were owned by Chinese. When the 200 Chinese owned laundry owners tried to renew their permits, only one permit was granted. Whereas, the non-Chinese applicants with the exception of one, all were granted.

San Francisco ordinance

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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

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The central issue of the case was whether the enforcement of the new requirements for laundries operated in wooden buildings violated Yick Wo's protections found in the United States Constitution. The Equal Protection Clause can be found in the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution. It requires that "no state...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." There is also the issue around whether a law can be written in a neutral way but enforced discriminately.

Arguments

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Lee Yick was financially supported by the Chinese Six Companies (now named the “Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association”), which raised $20,000 to hire attorney Hall McAllister, a former U.S. Circuit Court of California judge and founder of the California Bar Association. McAllister argued that because Chinese laundrymen could not receive a fair hearing in California, that the case therefore required federal review .

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

The argument on the side of the petitioner was about the administration of the new ordinance. The counsel strove to show that while Chinese applicants were denied permits to continue running their laundries in wooden buildings, non-Chinese individuals were nearly all granted permits under the same ordinance. 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

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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 amendments 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

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The Chinese Exclusion Act , passed in 1882, restricted the entry of Chinese immigrant laborers while subsequ

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