Yick Wo v. Hopkins

Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886), is 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 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.Asian Americans [3 Volumes]: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History [3 Volumes]. United States: ABC-CLIO, 2013, 1240. 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.“A $10 Fine. A Chinese Laundry. And a Supreme Court Ruling." SF Standard, 10 May 2026, sfstandard.com/2026/05/10/yick-wo-140-anniversary/

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.ABA Journal Aug 1982, p. 964 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 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."Yick Wo and the San Francisco Laundry Litigation of the Late 1800s." Hoodline, 18 Dec. 2025,hoodline.com/2015/08/yick-wo-and-the-san-francisco-laundry-litigation-of-the-late- 1800s/ 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.The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions. United States: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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

Issue 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."Motomura, Hiroshi. Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States. United States: Oxford University Press, USA, 2006. There is also the issue around whether a law can be written in a neutral way but enforced discriminately.

Arguments 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 “How a Chinese Laundryman Shaped US Civil Rights From San Francisco.” KQED, 5 Sept. 2025, kqed.org/news/12050233/how-a-chinese-laundryman-shaped-us-civil-rights-from-san-francisco/.

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 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:Yick Wo at 369

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:There are three ways to show purposeful discrimination in equal protection cases. The first is prima facie - the law is discriminatory on its face Strauder v. West Virginia 100 US 303 (1880). The second is discrimination in administration - this is the type of purposeful discrimination that is the subject of Yick Wo. The third is purpose shown by circumstantial evidence Rogers v. Lodge 458 US 613 (1982). Emanuel, S. L. (2023). Emanuel Law Outlines for Constitutional Law. United States: Aspen Publishing, 257.

Legacy

The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, restricted the entry of Chinese immigrant laborers while subsequent legislation imposed further restrictions, including heightened evidentiary standards on Chinese immigrants seeking admission, prohibiting the reentry of outbound Chinese immigrants, and more. In various decisions throughout of the later 19th century, the Supreme Court upheld such laws on the basis that they applied to new arrivals to the United States and not immigrants with permanent domicile.Fiss, Owen M. History of the Supreme Court of the United States. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 10.

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:Wong Kim Ark v. United States, 169 US 649Encyclopedia of American Civil Rights and Liberties [4 Volumes]: Revised and Expanded Edition [4 Volumes]. United States: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

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:Nomination of Anthony M. Kennedy to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundredth Congress, First Session ... December 14, 15, and 16, 1987. (1989) United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, 731.Flores 617 F. 2d at 1389

Yick Wo v. Hopkins

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