Center on Asian Americans and the Law 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, and Yale Law Schools.

Thomas Lee is the Leitner Family Professor of International Law at Fordham University School of Law. He holds A.B. (summa cum laude), A.M. (Regional Studies—East Asia), and J.D. degrees from Harvard, where he was Articles Chair of the Law Review and a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Government. He has written many articles and book chapters about constitutional law, international law, U.S. foreign relations law, federal courts, and legal history. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Virginia Law Schools; U.S. law adviser to the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Korea; and Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Before his academic career, Professor Lee clerked for Chief Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for Associate Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court and served as an active-duty U.S. naval cryptology officer ashore in Korea, Japan, and Washington DC, and afloat in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. He is also Of Counsel at Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, and a member of the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) Panel of Conciliators and of the American Law Institute. Professor Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1974.