Keynote Address: a Conversation With Justice Ming W. Chin
| Jurisdiction | California,United States |
| Author | By Cheryl Lee Johnson and Kathleen J. Tuttle |
| Publication year | 2020 |
| Citation | Vol. 30 No. 1 |
By Cheryl Lee Johnson and Kathleen J. Tuttle1
For the sixth year in a row it has been our good fortune to have a justice of the California Supreme Court as our keynote speaker. At last year's GSI we welcomed The Honorable Ming Chin who shared with the audience his upbringing, career path, professional experience, and judicial philosophy. The panel is presented in a question and answer format. Two former chairs of our Antitrust Section, Cheryl Lee Johnson and Kathleen J. Tuttle, posed the questions after a brief introduction. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.
MS. JOHNSON: It's a great honor to have with us today California Supreme Court Justice Ming Chin. He is now the longest serving justice on the court. Justice Chin has come a long way from his family's potato farm in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where he was born the youngest of eight children. As a child, Justice Chin worked seven days a week on the farm, and by the time he was 14, he could operate every piece of equipment on the farm—the hay bailers, the tractors, the combines. His parents both immigrated to the U.S. from China at a period of time in which the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. They bought 80 acres of farmland in 1936, and through hard work, expanded the farm to over 800 acres. It's still in his family. The parents did not have a formal education, but they always emphasized the value of education, and of course hard work and rotation of crops, right?
MS. JOHNSON: And optimism. When he was 14, Justice Chin gave up the immeasurable chores of hay bailing and followed the 16-year-old brother Tom to Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose. From there, he went on to receive both his BA and JD from the University of San Francisco. Following graduation from USF in 1967, Justice Chin was commissioned as a captain in the U.S. Army, where he served in Vietnam. He received a Bronze Star as well as the Army Commendation Medal for his outstanding service.
Justice Chin began his legal career in 1970 as the first Asian American to serve as a deputy district attorney for Alameda County. In 1973, he joined Aiken, Kramer & Cummings where he became the partner in charge of the litigation department, specializing in commercial and employment litigation.
In 1988, Governor George Deukmejian appointed him to the Alameda County Superior Court, and two years later, elevated him to the First District Court of Appeal. In 1966, a milestone year, Governor Pete Wilson nominated Justice Chin to the California Supreme Court to fill the seat of retiring Judge Arabian.
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At the time of his nomination, Justice Chin received wide acclaim including from Justice Carol Corrigan, then his colleague, on the First District Court of Appeal. She praised him as exceptionally talented, breathtakingly bright, and indefatigably hard working. Along the way, Justice Chin became the first Asian American president of the Alameda County Bar Association, and among his other—many other public service roles, he's a member of the Judicial Counsel of California and on the board of trustees of USF, and he's also served as an adjunct professor at USF law school.
Justice Chin and his wife Carol, a pharmacist, have two children who are both lawyers. His son Jason Chin was recently appointed by Governor Brown to the Superior Court of Alameda County, and his daughter Jennifer Chin is senior legal counsel to the University of California Regents.
With that brief introduction, I'm going to turn it over to Kathleen to start the conversation.
MS. TUTTLE: Thank you, Cheryl. We, first, Justice Chin, would like to talk some about your background. Despite all the talk these days about immigration, and there is a lot of talk, few realize that the Chinese were discriminated against for decades by the Federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It barred immigration of Chinese laborers and banned those already here from being naturalized.
Your parents immigrated to the United States from China while the Act was in effect. Your mother was held for six weeks on Angel Island, which I understand happened frequently when there was a glitch or more on their paperwork, more questions needed answering, and so forth.
How did all of this affect your parents' view of the United States?
JUSTICE CHIN: Well, that's a dark serious opening question.
MS. TUTTLE: And it's going to go down from there.
JUSTICE CHIN: It was not a good experience. My mother did not talk about it in detail because it was so traumatic for her. She was 24 years old, arrived in a foreign country, didn't speak the language, and she was incarcerated. She said it was like a jail. One night she went to the ladies' room, and one of the other inmates had hung herself. This is pretty traumatic for a 24-year-old girl, but she was never bitter. She was always optimistic in spite of the discrimination that they were exposed to.
They also made a lot of good friends. Our family home was burned when I was four. I lost my brother in that fire. And the only reason I'm telling you this is because the kindness of our neighbors was what got us through that experience. Our neighbors were away on their honeymoon at the time. They came back. They gave us the keys to their house where we stayed until we got back on our feet. So growing up in that rural community had its pluses and minuses. There were a lot more pluses.
MS. TUTTLE: Thank you. Along the same lines, your parents raised you in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Many of us may not think of Klamath Falls or Oregon or as being particularly diverse. And you've partially spoken about this, but give us a sense for what it was like growing up there.
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JUSTICE CHIN: We were the only Chinese family in the community, but we made many, many good friends. For the longest time, I thought I was Irish. I played McNamara in McNamara's Band on St. Patrick's Day, so I fit right in. My parents sent us, the three youngest—I'm youngest of eight. The three youngest of us were sent to a private Catholic grammar school, boarding school, in Klamath Falls. It was run by the sisters of St. Francis. This was an incredible education for three young children from an immigrant family because the sisters took us under their wings and really gave us a classical education. In the broadest sense of the word, we were taking art and music. I mean, this was in Klamath Falls. You would not think that a place like this would exist, but it did, and it gave us a terrific start on the educational process.
MS. JOHNSON: Well, it's been a long journey from your Oregon potato farm. What inspired you to leave potatoes, not that there is anything wrong with potatoes, but to pursue a career in law?
JUSTICE CHIN: It was, as I said, with the sisters of St. Francis. By the time I got to junior high school, the sisters had quite enough of the Chin family. They stopped boarding. So the only judge in town was a friend of my father's. And Judge David Vandenberg called my father and said, "Why don't you have Ming come and stay with us for the last two years of junior high school." So I did that. And the judge took me under his wing. He took me down to court. I was able to watch jury trials. He gave me the gun in a murder case. I said, "I don't think I want my fingerprints on that." He gave me Blackstone to read when I was 12. It's kind of amazing I became a lawyer. But he really was a terrific mentor and he taught me everything that a good lawyer and a good judge ought to be, and that was really my inspiration in applying for law school.
When I applied to law school, I called the judge and I said, "Would you write me a letter of recommendation?" He did, and I still have a picture of him in my chambers, and behind that picture in the frame is the letter that the judge...
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