LEGAL ANALYSIS 57 



B. Development of Pertinent Constitutional Clauses in the 

 Decisions of the United States Supreme Court 



1 . Equal Protection 



The Fourteenth Amendment to the federal constitution, adopted 

 immediately after the Civil War as part of the new limitations then 

 considered necessary to be imposed upon the states, contains the 

 following: 



". . . nor shall any state . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction 

 the equal protection of the laws."^ 



This clause has had its greatest and most dramatic use in cases 

 involving discriminations made on account of race, the most famous 

 of these being the decision of the United States Supreme Court in 

 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education,^ holding that a public school 

 system which segregated its schools upon a racial basis violated 

 this clause of the constitution. These racial discrimination cases 

 have developed under sufficiently different considerations that they 

 are considered only remotely connected with business regulations 

 and, therefore, not worthy of detailed treatment here. They will 

 accordingly be mentioned only in the few instances where certain 

 particular relevance is found. 



The use of the Equal Protection Clause in other, nonracial situ- 

 ations by the United States Supreme Court has been comparatively 

 rare. Enough cases, however, do exist for a fairly rational, con- 

 sistent pattern to have emerged. These situations have almost 

 always involved some state regulatory practice directed toward a 

 business activity in which some person claimed he had not received 

 the fair and equal treatment required by this constitutional clause. 

 A review of these cases is therefore pertinent. 



The first case,^ decided in 1886, had an inter-mixture of racial 

 discrimination. San Francisco, by ordinance, issued permits to those 

 who would engage in the laundry business in wooden buildings. 

 This ordinance seemed innocuous enough; the vice was that the 

 administrator who issued the licenses systematically excluded all 

 Chinese applicants, but issued licenses to all other applicants. Assum- 

 ing that the purpose of the ordinance was to reduce the hazards of 

 fire through the care in the licensing of laundry operators, the court 

 invalidated the ordinance as administered because it could see no 



1. U. S. Constitution, Am. XIV. §1. 



2. 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 



3. YickWo V. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356 (1886). 



