Righting a 'grievous wrong,' California justices grant posthumous law license to Chinese immigrant
The California Supreme Court has granted a posthumous law license to a Chinese immigrant 125 years after it refused to admit him into the bar.
In a decision on Monday, the court said it was granting the law license to Hong Yen Chang in “a candid reckoning with a sordid chapter of our state and national history.” The Los Angeles Times and the San Jose Mercury News have stories on the decision (PDF), the result of work by Chang’s living relatives, law students and law professors at the University of California at Davis, and the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, which provided pro bono representation.
When the California Supreme Court denied Chang a law license in 1890, state law barred law licenses to noncitizens, and a federal law barred citizenship for “persons of the Mongolian race.”
Chang had been granted a law license in New York in 1888, making him the first Chinese lawyer admitted to the bar in the United States. The 1890 decision by the California Supreme Court had found New York issued the license without legal authority.
The California Supreme Court’s decision on Monday noted that the court had struck down the ban on noncitizens practicing law in 1972, and the state had passed a law in 2013 making immigrants who entered the country illegally eligible for bar admission.
“It is past time to acknowledge that the discriminatory exclusion of Chang from the State Bar of California was a grievous wrong,” the court said.
