Yick Wo v. Hopkins

Facts

Yick Wo and Wo Lee were Chinese subjects who carried on laundry businesses in San Francisco. Ordinances of the board of supervisors of the county and city allowed laundries in buildings of brick or stone without restriction. Wooden buildings, which made up nearly all those previously used for laundries, could be used only with the consent of the supervisors. The Court read the ordinances as giving the supervisors a naked and arbitrary power to give or withhold that consent, as to persons as well as places. Both petitioners had met every requirement that the law or the officers deemed necessary to protect neighboring property from fire or to protect public health. The supervisors still withheld consent from them and from two hundred others who had also petitioned, all of whom happened to be Chinese subjects. Eighty others, who were not Chinese subjects, were allowed to carry on the same business under similar conditions. The fact of this discrimination was admitted, and no reason for it was shown. The petitioners were sentenced to imprisonment for violating the ordinances.

Issues

1. Does the Fourteenth Amendment protect aliens, such as the Chinese subjects in this case, as well as citizens?
2. Does a law that is fair on its face still deny equal protection of the laws when public officers apply it so that only one racial or national group is refused its benefit?

Holding

The supervisors refused consent to the petitioners and two hundred other Chinese applicants while allowing eighty others, not Chinese subjects, to run the same business under similar conditions, with no reason except hostility to race and nationality. That denied equal protection, so the imprisonment was illegal and the petitioners had to be discharged.