The Rise in Anti-AAPI Violence and a Portrait of Asian Americans in the Law 2.0

Between March and December of 2020, Stop AAPI Hate cataloged nearly 3,000 self-reported accounts of anti-Asian hate. In New York City, violence against AAPIs has increased by a staggering 847 percent last year. California has seen a similar escalation in hate crimes and violence against members of the AAPI community. Even worse, these figures are likely undercounts as many of these anti-AAPI incidents go unreported. At the same time, even as AAPIs have become a growing share of the legal profession, AAPIs remain notably absent in senior leadership roles.

• How are these two phenomena connected?
• What contributes to AAPI hate?
• Why is society often slow to respond?
• How does anti-Asian bias and discrimination affect Asian Americans pursuing a career in law?
• What role can Asian American attorneys play in addressing this issue?

Please join the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), the Asian American Bar Association of NY (AABANY), the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Silicon Valley (APABA-SV), and Cooley LLP for a fireside discussion with Associate Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court.

About Justice Goodwin Liu

Justice Goodwin Liu is an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court. Nominated by Governor Jerry Brown, Justice Liu was unanimously confirmed by the Commission on Judicial Appointments and sworn into office on September 1, 2011. He was retained by the electorate in 2014. Before joining the state’s highest court, Justice Liu was Professor of Law and Associate Dean at the UC Berkeley School of Law. His primary areas of expertise are constitutional law, education law and policy, and diversity in the legal profession.

The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Justice Liu grew up in Sacramento, where he attended public schools. He went to Stanford University and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1991. He attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and earned a masters degree in philosophy and physiology. Upon returning to the United States, he went to Washington D.C. to help launch the AmeriCorps national service program and worked for two years as a senior program officer at the Corporation for National Service.

Justice Liu graduated from Yale Law School in 1998, becoming the first in his family to earn a law degree. He clerked for Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then worked as Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. He went on to clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the October 2000 Term. From 2001 to 2003, he worked in the litigation practice of O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C.

Justice Liu continues to teach constitutional law as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute. He serves on the Council of the American Law Institute, on the Board of Directors of the James Irvine Foundation, and on the Yale University Council. He has previously served on the California Commission on Access to Justice, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science, Technology, and Law, the Board of Trustees of Stanford University, and the governing boards of the American Constitution Society, the National Women’s Law Center, and the Public Welfare Foundation.

About Judge Pamela K. Chen

Pamela Chen is a federal district court judge in the Eastern District of New York. Since her appointment to the bench in March 2013, Judge Chen has presided over a wide array of civil and criminal cases, including a civil lawsuit challenging New York’s ban on the possession of nunchuks, the tax fraud prosecution of former U.S. Congressman Michael Grimm, and the RICO prosecution of FIFA soccer officials. Between September 1998 and March 2013, Judge Chen was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, except for a brief period in 2008, when she served as Deputy Commissioner for Enforcement in the New York State Division of Human Rights. During her tenure in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Judge Chen investigated and prosecuted cases involving terrorism, gang violence, drug trafficking, human trafficking, official misconduct, and civil rights crimes. Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Judge Chen was a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Special Litigation Section. Judge Chen began her legal career at the law firm of Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., and also worked at Asbill, Junkin, Myers and Buffone in Washington, D.C. She obtained her law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center and her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan.