Chapter 540 The Wheel of Hell

According to criminal psychology, people who like to wear black clothes are often good at controlling their emotions, and don't like others to see through them, and like to maintain a sense of mystery.

People who like to wear colorful clothes generally have stronger vanity and desire to express themselves.

Severus and Lockhart are the most obvious examples.

Ma Youxuan wears the same brightly colored clothes as Lockhart, but he feels very different to Pomona than Lockhart.

If you're unlucky enough to be a woman, and you happen to be wiser than a man, the smart thing to do is to hide yourself, or you'll be just as unlikable as Hermione.

Pomona felt the same feeling on Ma Youxuan's body. The colorful embroidery was embroidered on the black Chinese stand-up collar, which was improved from the Chinese tunic suit that Sun Yat-sen once wore.

She felt that he had great ambitions, but he hid his paws in the pads like a cat.

He is very dangerous, maybe he is thinking about something. Overseas Chinese are different from those in China. Businessmen in Chinatown in London are now united to resist the speculative rent increase by big real estate developers.

In the United States, the Chinese did similar things before, not long after the Civil War, and what they fought against was not real estate developers, but the judiciary of the US federal government.

The American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was largely caused by slavery, and the Scott case in 1857 was the direct trigger.

According to the Treaty of Missouri, some states in the United States are free states and some states are slave states. The black slave Dred Scott followed his master to the free state of Illinois and the free quasi-state of Wisconsin, where he lived for two years, and then returned to the slave state of Missouri.

His owner, Emerson, was a doctor. Because the Seminole War broke out and many doctors were needed, Emerson went, but Emerson died after performing his duties. After his death, Scott filed a lawsuit for freedom. The case was in the Missouri Supreme Court and the federal court were dismissed, and Mrs. Emerson immediately resold Scott to her cousin.

Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. During the U.S. Supreme Court trial, the case received widespread attention due to the impact of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and "Bleeding Kansas."

Scott's wife, Harriet, was originally a black slave of a U.S. Army major, Talia Ferro. In 1835, the major took Harriet to Srinneburg. In 1836, the major sold her as a slave to Dr. Emerson. , Emerson kept her slavery until 1838. With Emerson's consent, Scott and Harriet married, and they had two daughters, Eliza and Liz. Eliza was born in 1843, on a steamboat named "Gipps" on the Mississippi River north of the northern boundary of Missouri; Liz was born in 1850 in the military camp named Jefferson in Missouri Inside.

Eliza and Liz were born in territories where slavery was excluded, and the process had made them free men, as should his wife and children.

After two court debates, the final nine justices upheld the original verdict with a vote of 7:2.

The reading of the legal opinion took two days. Representative Tenney's judgment mainly includes three main aspects:

1. Even free Negroes are not and cannot be citizens of the United States as the Constitution calls them;

2. Scott could not be a free man because he lived in an area where slavery was excluded by the Missouri Compromise, because the terms of the compromise which excluded slavery itself exceeded the constitutional powers of Congress;

3. Scott cannot be free just because he was in Illinois, because once he returns to Missouri, his status is governed only by Missouri law.

As the United States expanded, new states continued to appear. At this time, the slave trade across the ocean has declined. In the United States, new slaves can only be born from the original slaves, so the source of slaves has become a problem.

If there were no subsequent constitutional amendments, the Scott case would have determined that blacks have always been in an inferior position, even if all slaves were emancipated.

During the U.S. presidential election in 1860, Lincoln, as the Republican candidate, proposed that "the 'normal state' in the federal territories should be free, and that neither Congress nor anyone can legitimize slavery."

The Scott case is a watershed case in the history of the Supreme Court. Before the Scott case was judged, the prestige of the Supreme Court was unprecedented. Taney's noble character, gentlemanly demeanor and wisdom, his abandonment of narrow partisan concepts, and his pursuit of justice and harmony earned him the respect of his colleagues and the people of the whole country.

But after the Scott case, everything changed. In 1865 Senator Charles Sam declared that "Tayney's name will be hissed off the annals of history, who presided over justice for twenty-five years, but at last he did it viciously and brought shame to the judiciary of our country, Disgrace this era." For more than a century, the Scott case has become a typical example of judicial arbitrariness. In fact, the justices of the Supreme Court try to avoid this topic as much as possible. Just as Justice Robert Jackson said, "One such precedent is enough."

An 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to blacks invalidated the Missouri Compromise. After the war, the United States passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, gave blacks equal citizenship, and gave blacks the right to vote. 600,000 people paid with their lives for this, compared with World War I and World War II More people died in battle.

The Civil War is also known as the Third War of Independence. In the early days of the founding of the country, the South, dominated by the plantation economy, had an overwhelming advantage in terms of the number of members of the House of Representatives and the population.

But with the increase of immigration, a new situation has emerged. The job opportunities that the plantation economic model can provide are very limited, far inferior to factories. So the northern states quickly surpassed the southern states in population.

Many of these immigrants came from Ireland, where the famine occurred in 1845, and Chinese "pigs" from Guangdong.

Most of the people called "pigs" in the late Qing Dynasty were sold to work abroad. The Irish were called "white slaves", and the Chinese were called "pigs". In the 1860s, the Western Central Pacific Railway and the The Union Pacific Railway on the Eastern Line had a road-building competition between two road-paving armies. Whoever got to the west coast first would be the "winner". The government would pay the winner, and the loser would get nothing. layout.

The inhuman treatment, seasickness, typhoon, and infectious disease of the "pigs" squeezed in the bilge or forced to stay on the deck are always threatened. The long journey from China to the United States has resulted in countless casualties; when they finally landed, what awaited them was harsh working conditions and environments: laying rails along steep granite and steep shale, hanging baskets 1,400 feet above the river On this railway that runs through mountains, deserts, and swamps, not only the body of a white slave is buried under each sleeper, but also the bones of a Chinese are buried.

However, the Chinese workers who worked hard, received low pay, and put in countless sweat and blood were not recognized: In the commemorative photos of the integration, the Chinese workers were all driven aside and not allowed to be photographed. Moreover, the figure of more than 12,000 Chinese laborers has been submerged in history for a long time.

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870 gave blacks the right to vote. One of its important contents was that "every state shall not deny anyone the equal protection of the law within its jurisdiction", although the original intention of this law was to protect free blacks. Freedom from discrimination, but this provision also allows other ethnic groups to use the Constitution to protect themselves. It’s just that for many years since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted this amendment very narrowly, causing states to still have a lot of power within their jurisdiction to violate the freedom and rights of ethnic minorities.

As early as 1852, the California State Legislature passed a discriminatory tax law against Chinese gold miners. In 1854, the Supreme Court of California ruled that "Chinese people have no right to testify against white people in court", which further intensified the anti-Chinese action, and San Francisco then joined the ranks of exclusion of Chinese. During the ten years from 1870 to 1880, there were a large number of Chinese laundries in San Francisco. These laundries demonstrated the business talents of the Chinese and brought business threats to the white American laundries. So the white Americans wanted to drive the Chinese out of the city through elaborate legal design.

Between 1873 and 1884, the local municipality passed 14 laws known as the "Laundry Regulations", of which Regulation No. 1569 passed in May 1880 and Regulation No. Anyone who opens, maintains and operates a laundromat in a wooden building in the city must obtain a business license from the municipality. However, it does not specify the criteria for the municipality to grant and refuse business licenses, which leaves the municipality with discretionary power to accept or reject applications as it pleases. Under the same conditions, all applications from laundry owners identified as Chinese were rejected, while all white applicants received the green light and successfully obtained their licenses.

The Qing government was corrupt and incompetent, and the Chinese never thought of finding a local ambassador to solve this problem. Chinese laundry owners united to form an industry association "Tongxintang" to resist unfair legal treatment. They fund legal funds to pay attorneys' fees for litigation and other costs of challenging unjust laws.

Huaren Yihe has been operating a local laundry for 22 years, during which all his business operations have complied with all local safety and hygiene standards, but the municipal authority rejected his application for a business license in accordance with the new "Laundry Regulations", so he Became the best plaintiff to challenge Regulations 1569 and 1587.

With the support of "Tong Xin Tang", Yihe and other laundromat owners ignored the new "laundry regulations" and continued to operate their laundromats as usual. Before long, they were all arrested by the authorities. A major judicial case with a far-reaching impact on the American constitution is about to begin.

Yihe took the arresting Sheriff Hopkins to court. He petitioned the California Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus to set him free, alleging that the Laundry Ordinance violated the California Constitution, the United States Federal Constitution, and the 1880 Sino-American Treaty. But the California Supreme Court rejected the charges.

While Yihe was suing Hopkins, another Chinese laundry owner, Heli, brought the same lawsuit to the U.S. Federal Circuit Court for the District of California. Similarly, his request for rights and interests was also rejected, but because the implementation of these regulations would drive out Chinese laundries from the market and give monopoly to laundries established by white capital, the ruling expressed reservations to the "Laundry Regulations" Opinion.

Due to dissatisfaction with the rulings of the California Supreme Court and the US Federal Circuit Court of the District of California, Yihe and Heli appealed to the US Federal Supreme Court respectively. Because the two cases are similar, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to try them together and focus on one issue: whether the petitioner was deprived of the rights granted by the U.S. Constitution or the U.S. Federal Constitution.

The Federal Supreme Court first affirmed the principle established by the Federal Circuit Court in Guo Huan v. United States: the equal protection of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution applies to both U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens. After clarifying that although the owner of a Chinese laundromat is not a U.S. citizen, he is also protected by the Constitution, the court reviewed the Laundry Ordinance to determine whether it violated the U.S. Constitution. Through a review of the regulations, the court found that although the two regulations No. 1587 and No. 1569 appear to be neutral, the way they are implemented greatly compromises this neutrality. The court held that in the implementation of the regulations, they specifically targeted a specific group of Chinese, which actually denied equal legal protection to Chinese.

Finally, the court stated that "though the regulations themselves are just and appear to be impartial, the denial of the justice of equality is still constitutional if they are executed and applied by public authorities with malicious intent and in an unequal manner. prohibited". As a result, Justice Stanley Matthews announced the unanimous judgment of the justices on behalf of the Supreme Court: it was ruled that the rights of the two Chinese complainants had been violated and they ordered their immediate release. So far, the two Chinese lawsuits have won the final victory.

Those who want to stand up are those who do not want to be slaves, and those who do not want to stand up have no choice. The house-elves at Hogwarts don't have this kind of "stand up" heart. After Dobby's death, there are no more house-elves who want to pursue freedom.

So when Severus gave them the task of making silver bullets from Wolfsbane, they all obeyed, even though he was no longer the Headmaster of Hogwarts.

"Look at Harry, it's fake, it's real to find someone to work." Pomona looked at the house elves in the kitchen, who were happily discussing with silver ingots, and didn't feel that they were enslaved at all. up.

Severus sighed in pleasure, letting the weight off his shoulders like a longshoreman unloading.

"My time is precious, and I don't spend it on boring and repetitive tasks." He said in an obviously proud but calm tone, "Harry Potter is incompetent at all as the director of the Department of Legal Enforcement. If he doesn't study well, he can't study law well, and if he doesn't have the reputation of being a savior, he will be as useless as his father."

"You will feel very happy to ridicule their father and son, right?"

"You really understand me." Severus twisted his lips into a malicious smile, "Lazy, stupid, and arrogant..."

Pomona rolled her eyes, didn't he feel tired after saying the same thing so many times?