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.

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.

[1] 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.

[1]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.

[4] 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.

[1] 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:[6][8] 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.

"[6] 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.

[2] As Justice Anthony Kennedy has explained, the holding of Yick Wo is about purposeful discrimination:[9][10] 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.Even after the Yick Wo decision Supreme Court case law continued to apply a Dred Scott-like standard excluding Chinese from the protections of the constitution in immigration cases.

[12] The Court in Fong Yue wrote that Yick Wo was a case about "the power of a State over aliens continuing to reside within its jurisdiction".

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:[16][17] One of the first cases interpreting the equal protection clause stands for the rule, among others, that the effect of a law may be so harsh or adverse in its weight against a particular race that an intent to discriminate is not only a permissible inference but also a necessary one.