Stating that it was “past time to acknowledge that [his] discriminatory exclusion . . . from the State Bar of California was a grievous wrong,” the Supreme Court this morning granted Hong Yen Chang “posthumous admission as an attorney and counselor at law in all courts of the state of California.”
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the court denied Chang’s admission application because he was not an American citizen and was prohibited by federal law from becoming a citizen. Noting that revisiting the denial “requires a candid reckoning with a sordid chapter of our state and national history,” the court recounts in some detail that racist history and concludes that “the legal and policy underpinnings of our 1890 decision have been discredited.”
In a per curiam opinion, the court states that previously denying Chang admission to the bar “denied Chang equal protection of the laws . . . [and] was also a blow to countless others who, like Chang, aspired to become a lawyer only to have their dream deferred on account of their race, alienage, or nationality. And it was a loss to our communities and to society as a whole, which denied itself the full talents of its people and the important benefits of a diverse legal profession.”
The court’s acknowledgment of past governmental and societal wrongs, and of its part in those wrongs, makes the court a truth and reconciliation commission of sorts. Assuming that salutary role cannot help but have a positive effect.
The motion for Chang’s posthumous admission — drafted by Munger, Tolles, and Olson — was made by the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association at the University of California, Davis, and supported by the State Senate and by Chang’s descendants.
[June 6, 2025 update: Julie Ho has this obituary of Chang in the New York Times. It’s “part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.”]
