The size of the Court is not specified; the Constitution leaves it to Congress to set the number of justices.

When the cases in volume 118 U.S. were decided the Court comprised the following nine members: Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 356 (1886), was the first case in which the Supreme Court held that a law, race-neutral on its face but administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

By the 1950s, the Warren Court used the principle established in Yick Wo to strike down several attempts by states and municipalities in the Deep South to limit the political rights of blacks.

The case is most notable for a headnote written by the Supreme Court's Reporter of Decisions, Bancroft Davis, stating that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment grants constitutional protections to corporations as it does to natural persons, although the text of the decision itself does not establish this principle.

The decision led to the creation of the federal Interstate Commerce Commission, the first modern regulatory agency in the United States.