California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu shared some sobering statistics about Asian American representation in the legal profession but also expressed optimism in what lies ahead during a discussion hosted by the SEC’s Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Committee as part of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month.

Justice Liu has spearheaded the Portrait Project, “A Portrait of Asian Americans in the Law,” and he discussed his research on implicit bias and the underrepresentation of minorities in judicial clerkships.

While the number of Asian American lawyers has nearly tripled in the last 20 years, they continue to be underrepresented in federal and state clerkships and judgeships. Furthermore, when data in the first phase of the project was finalized in 2016, only four out of the 2,437 elected prosecutors in the United States were Asian American and just three of the 94 U.S. Attorneys were of Asian descent.

Two graphics display. First one shows that in 2014 data, Asian Americans made up approximately 2% of judges serving on state appellate court or general jurisdiction trial court. Second one shows that in 2016 data, only 37 Asian Americans have ever served as Article III judges.

Despite these numbers, the overall trend lines do point to a more positive outlook. The number of Asian American general counsels for Fortune 1000 companies has grown from seven to 43 in the last 15 years, and the number of Asian American women entering law school has steadily increased.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who gave opening remarks at the event, noted the growing impact of Asian Americans at the SEC, where they represent 13 percent of the total workforce and 16.5 percent of new hires. “At the SEC, we celebrate our diversity and strive to make the agency as inclusive as possible,” Chair Gensler noted.

Justice Liu was born in Augusta, Georgia, the son of immigrants recruited to the U.S. as doctors from Taiwan to work in underserved areas. In college, he studied biology and pre-med before deciding on a career in the law. If it weren’t for a couple of years of “exploring the world,” he would have defaulted to medicine, he explained to the audience. An Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court since 2011, he also continues to teach constitutional law at Harvard Law School.

The genesis of the Portrait Project, Justice Liu stated, was to better understand the path of Asian Americans in the legal profession. By using literature reviews, collecting and analyzing data, conducting focus groups and distributing a national survey, “it became apparent to me how thin the ranks of Asian Americans are at the top of the legal profession,” he said.

At the SEC, we celebrate our diversity and strive to make the agency as inclusive as possible.

Chair Gary Gensler

Justice Liu and his law students are currently in the midst of updating this project with a new national survey and new datasets. In particular, they want to focus more attention on ethnic subgroups, and they want to hear how Asian Americans contemplate their identity and whether it has changed their desired focus as lawyers.

When asked about what advice he would give Asian Americans, Justice Liu responded that the “biggest thing that I would say is actually having the courage to do something different that follows your basic instincts and passions. It’s hard to have the confidence to go off and do something different than what others expect. When I went into law, I had no idea what I was doing.”

The future bodes well, Justice Liu explained. “The fact is that the kids coming up behind us have one intangible asset that we didn’t have, and that’s 60,000 Asian American lawyers to look up to,” he said. “All of us, everyone in the audience, you can pay it forward and be an example in your schools and communities. It’s important to have visible role models. Otherwise, people count themselves out.