In March of 1900 several cases of bubonic plague were discovered in San Francisco's Chinatom. In response the health authorities, at the instance of the Surgeon General of the United States, sought to implement a series of extraordinarily coercive measures aimed at the city's Asian inhabitants. The measures provoked an uproar among the Chinese, and they determined to challenge them in the federal Circuit Court for the Northern District of California. This essay, based on extensive research in court records, the archives of the U.S. Public Health Service, and press accounts in English and Chinese, documents the complex events that gave rise to the cases of Wong Wai v. Williamson and Jew Ho v. Williamson and the cases themselves as they unfolded in the courts. The cases raised new and dificult questions of fact and of law and tested as few other cases have before or since a court's capacity to act as arbiter between individual rights (and the rights of an ostracized minority at that) and the public interest in a period of acute health emergency.

An issue of continuing debate in the legal and social science literature is how best to control and validate the exercise of essentially legislative powers by administrative agencies. This study examines one mechanism of control, administrative de novo review of agency decisionmaking. It explores how this device functions in immigration bail administration, a system where there is a broad and vague delegation of detention and bail powers to government officials in an area of law where there is no set of preferences as to how conflicting policy claims are to be weighed in decisionmaking. The study shows a system in turmoil. The de novo review body—the immigration court—frequently and substantially modifies the Immigration Service's initial bail decisions. Because there is no agreement on the norms to guide decisionmaking, these changes have little effect on ongoing agency activity and policies. Pronounced interagency conflict and extreme decisional disparity persist given limited institutional and political arrangements for dealing with this dissensus. The study explores in detail the institutional cultures and conflicting legal and social values that shape the practice and patterns of de novo review in this field of law and discusses the implications of such conflict for the full functioning of this external review device.