A group of UC Davis law students are trying to overturn a nearly 125-year-old injustice, the Washington Post and the UC Davis School of Law report.
The California Supreme Court denied bar admission to Hong Yen Chang in 1890. Chang was a Columbia Law School graduate and a member of the New York State bar, but he could not become a California lawyer because he was a Chinese immigrant — California did not allow noncitizens to practice law and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens. The law students have approached the State Bar and will petition the Supreme Court for Chang’s posthumous admission.
California and its Supreme Court have some ugly racism in their past concerning the treatment of Chinese. As just one example, the Legislature passed a law barring Chinese from testifying against “any white man.” Upholding the statute’s constitutionality, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a white man for robbery against a Chinese immigrant because the victim had testified to the crime. (People v. Brady (1870) 40 Cal. 198, 213 [“in excluding Chinamen the Legislature exercises a discretion properly entrusted to it, and . . . a proper exercise of it in the interests of justice, although it may exclude a Chinaman where another is allowed to testify, is not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment”].)
