Tell us about your community growing up. Looking back, how did they shape who you are now?

My parents emigrated from South Korea to Pennsylvania—my mother completed her medical training in Pittsburgh, and my father attended graduate school in Philadelphia. I was born in Philadelphia and raised in a typical 1980s suburb. I was fortunate to attend excellent public schools, which helped lay the foundation for higher education and, eventually, my career in appellate law. The Korean and Korean American community in Philadelphia was small relative to New York or Los Angeles, but my parents remained connected by working at a medical clinic that served the immigrant community and editing a Korean-language newspaper. I think that having a foot in these very different communities has helped me bridge differences with clients (when I was an advocate) and now with diverse litigants (as a family law bench officer).

Describe your journey to law school. What motivated you to enroll?

I didn’t know any lawyers when growing up and never saw myself going to law school. When I graduated from college, I intended to become an English professor and enrolled in English graduate school at Berkeley. While writing my dissertation, I took a part-time administrative job at a legal nonprofit that did impact litigation. That job inspired me to apply to law school—I did eventually finish the dissertation, but it had to wait a few years.

What was your law school experience like?

Law school was intellectually challenging and a big change from English graduate school in terms of the pace and substance. I particularly enjoyed working as a research assistant for two professors, Kenji Yoshino and Reva Siegel, who taught Constitutional Law and Antidiscrimination Law. They both drew on humanities disciplines, such as literature and history, to inform their study of the law.

Did you know about appellate work in law school? If not, when and how did it first get on your radar and why were you drawn to it?

I learned about appellate work in the first semester of law school because I had two teaching assistants in my Constitutional Law class who had secured clerkships on the Second Circuit and took us on a field trip to New York to watch oral argument. The substantive arguments were mostly over my head—I recalled a lot of discussion of a case called Apprendi [v. New Jersey], which I later came to learn much more about—but the experience was memorable. We also did a moot court exercise in that course, and I was drawn to the process of synthesizing the law and the facts and crafting a brief. During my 1L and 2L summers, I also had the opportunity to do appellate work and felt it suited my strengths in legal research and writing.

Tell us about one of your appellate cases that you found particularly meaningful.

While at the Federal Public Defender’s Office, I won a case called United States v. Wang, which involved Sentencing Guidelines errors. The reversal allowed my client to be sentenced under the correct guideline and resulted in a much lower term of imprisonment. From an appellate nerd perspective, it’s meaningful to win a case on plain error—that is, an error that had not been raised below by trial counsel—in a published decision. And I had the rare opportunity to argue this case in front of an audience of law students at the University of Hawaii. It’s unusual to have that kind of energy at an appellate argument.

How often do you encounter other Asian Americans in the appellate field? Why do you think that representation is important?

It’s still relatively rare to encounter other Asian Americans in the appellate field, unfortunately.  Representation heightens the public perception of fairness and improves decisionmaking by ensuring that diverse experiences are taken into account.

What advice would you give to a law student of color who aspires to be where you are now?

First, find mentors early on in your law school career. Mentors are vital to obtaining a clerkship, which is not only one of the best jobs you will ever have but an important credential if you want to pursue a career in appellate law. Second, keep an open mind about your career trajectory, and don’t be afraid to leave the beaten track. I left an excellent job in the appellate practice at a large law firm for government service, where I had an opportunity to argue three appeals in the Ninth Circuit within my first year. Now, I serve on a busy trial court, which is rewarding and invigorating.

What’s one thing law schools and/or the appellate bar can do to ensure our highest courts are representative of all our communities?

I’ve just mentioned the importance of the clerkship as a credential in appellate practice. Nevertheless, to ensure a more representative appellate bar, and thus a more representative appellate bench, I think it’s important for the appellate bar to look beyond the credential and to evaluate a candidate’s strengths in the essential skills of legal research, writing, and oral advocacy.