Leadership

Judge Chin was confirmed as a Circuit Judge in April 2010, after serving some sixteen years as a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. He took senior status on June 1, 2021. He graduated from Princeton University magna cum laude and received his law degree from Fordham Law School, where he served as managing editor of the Law Review. He clerked for the Honorable Henry F. Werker in the Southern District of New York; was associated with the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell; served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; was a founding partner of the law firm Campbell, Patrick & Chin; and was a partner at a firm specializing in labor and employment law, Vladeck, Waldman & Engelhard, P.C.

Judge Chin was born in Hong Kong. He was the first Asian American appointed a United States District Judge outside the Ninth Circuit and the first Asian American appointed to the Second Circuit. He served as President of the Asian American Bar Association of New York from 1992-1993. Judge Chin and his wife Kathy Hirata Chin have written, produced, and presented, together with a team from the Asian American Bar Association of New York, a series of reenactments of historic cases involving Asian American litigants. He has taught Asian Americans and the Law at Fordham, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Law Schools.

Thomas H. Lee is one of the country's leading constitutional, national security and international law scholars and litigators. He is the Leitner Family Professor of International Law at Fordham, where he has taught constitutional law, federal jurisdiction and litigation, international arbitration, international law, national security law, and telecommunications law.  He is also the Co-Director of the Center on Asian Americans and the Law; a partner at Gruenstein Law; and a member of the American Law Institute (elected 2014).  

In 2024, Lee was lead counsel in the first lawsuit to secure a federal court ruling that the Corporate Transparency Act, a federal law requiring millions of businesses to disclose their beneficial owners to the government, was unconstitutional. From 2019 to 2020, he served as Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense, where he advised on a wide variety of national security law matters.  He has also been a Visiting Professor at Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia law schools; a member of the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) Panel of Conciliators; and U.S. Law Adviser to the Constitutional Court of Korea.  He has served as an expert witness in U.S. and foreign litigation and international arbitration regarding the Alien Tort Statute, the American legal system, investment treaty claims and international territorial disputes.

Lee graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and with honors from Harvard Law School, where he was Articles Chair of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he clerked for Judge Michael Boudin on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for Justice David H. Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Before law school, he served as an active-duty U.S. naval cryptology officer aboard submarines and with the National Security Agency.