Supreme
Court corrects 125-year-old ruling, grants license to Chinese immigrant
The
California Supreme Court made history last month when it granted posthumous
State Bar admission to Hong Yen Chang, who was denied a law license 125 years
ago due to federal and state laws denying citizenship and employment to Chinese
Americans.
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Hong Yen Chang - Courtesy of the Ah Tye Family |
Chang
overcame numerous obstacles to become licensed to practice in New York in 1888,
but when he moved to California two years later, the high court here rejected
his application.
Since
then, the anti-Chinese exclusionary laws and policies that led to his rejection
have been renounced.
“Even
if we cannot undo history, we can acknowledge it and, in doing so, accord a
full measure of recognition to Chang’s path-breaking efforts to become the
first lawyer of Chinese descent in the United States,” the court wrote in its
unanimous March 16 opinion.
Chang’s
descendants and the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association at the
University of California Davis School of Law spearheaded the effort to right
the historic wrong.
The
law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, working pro bono, filed a petition with
the court late last year.
“I
thought it was important to start addressing a stain on California’s judicial
history and make amends to the Chinese people,” Munger partner and former State
Bar President Jeffrey Bleich told the Los Angeles
Times.
The
state Senate called for Chang’s admission to the bar via a unanimous resolution
and the State Bar of California granted Chang honorary membership “in
repudiation of the discrimination against Asians that unjustly formed the basis
for barring his admission to the bar in 1890.”
UC Davis Law Professor Gabriel Chin told
the San Francisco Chronicle, that the case showed
both the rewards of a long fight for justice and the drawbacks of having to
wait more than a century for it.
Chin also told the newspaper that it was
fitting that Monday’s ruling came from “perhaps the most diverse state Supreme
Court in the country.” Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye and Justices Ming Chin
and Goodwin Liu are of Asian descent and Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar was
born in Mexico.
Rachelle Chong, Chang’s grandniece and one of
four family members who’ve become California lawyers, told
the San Jose Mercury News the
family is "thrilled" the state Supreme Court reversed its own 1890
ruling. She, along with a cousin working on a book about Chang, discovered the
old Supreme Court ruling while in law school in the early 1990s. Chong was the first Asian-American to serve on the Federal
Communications Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission.
"We feel we were the only family left to try to clear up
this historic wrong," she told the paper.