The Color Fault Lines: Asian American Justice from 2000

This symposium aims to connect those of us here scholars, lawyers, community workers and law students. It also aims to link "us" with our Asian American communities, and then beyond, with African Americans, Native Americans and Hawaiians, Latinas/os and white Americans of good will, and then beyond that, with all people struggling against forms of social discrimination. In doing so, the symposium specifically aims to further a joint project of envisioning Asian American participation in justice struggles from the Year 2000 on. Let's turn to history to my spring semester, second year at Boalt Hall, when I took a two-credit externship at Dale Minami's new law office in Oakland (Dale had just left the Asian Law Caucus). Late every Thursday, Dale would sit and talk about political lawyering about the importance of not only knowing the mechanics of in-the-trenches lawyering practice, but also of having a sophisticated theoretical grasp of how law and the courts really operate in a largely white-dominated (but demographically changing), capitalist society. He was skeptical and hopeful, harsh and uplifting and always critically strategic. He would tell me, "start now, do; but also always read and think." So I did small legal things in the Asian American community and with APALSA. I studied Marxist Theory of the State and Law and Ancient Law, and I read Legal Realism, Legal Process, Asian American History, John Rawls and "Law Against the People." (I would have taken critical race theory and social justice courses with Professors Harris and Wildman if they had existed.) When I started a complex litigation practice and did community law work, I found the critical take on law and legal process immensely useful. Seeing the system from the outside helped me function on the inside. Several years later, this all came even more vividly to life when Dale and others asked me to join the Fred Korematsu coram nobis legal team to reopen the infamous WWII Japanese American internment case Korematsu