Question

What happened when Lee Yick appealed his conviction for running an illegal laundry in San Francisco to the U.S. Supreme Court?


A.
The Supreme Court ruled that Lee Yick and his family be deported to his native China.


B.
The Supreme Court ordered that he immediately be granted American citizenship.


C.
The Supreme Court refused to hear the case and returned it to lower courts for review.


D.
The Supreme Court decided that authorities had unfairly singled him out because of his race.

Answer 1

D.
On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Yick Wo argued that the ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment, as the law denied him equal protection of the laws. He pointed out that only one-quarter of the laundries could operate under the ordinance, with 73 owned by non-Chinese and only one owned by a Chinese. San Francisco contended the ordinance was a valid exercise of the police powers granted by the U.S. Constitution to cities and states.

Justice Stanley Matthews, writing for a unanimous court, struck down the ordinance. Matthews looked past the neutral language to strike down the ordinance as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. He found that the division between wood and brick buildings was an "arbitrary line." Moreover, whatever the intent of the law may have been, the administration of the ordinance was carried out "with a mind so unequal and oppressive as to amount to a practical denial by the state" of equal protection of the laws.

Matthews held that:

Though the law itself be fair on its face, and impartial in appliance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the constitution.

Because the unequal application of the ordinance furthered "unjust and illegal discrimination," the Court ruled that the ordinance was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Yick Wo has become a central part of Civil Rights jurisprudence. If a law has a discriminatory purpose or is administered unequally, courts will apply the Fourteenth Amendment and strike down the law. Yick Wo is also the source of modern civil rights Disparate Impact cases, in which discrimination is established by statistical inequality rather than through proof of intentional discrimination.

Courtesy of:
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Lee+Yick

Answer 2

woah, thanks!