List of Asian American jurists

Scholars have argued that Asian American representation in the United States judiciary has lagged behind other racial groups.^[1] Citizenship is an integral factor in one's ability to become a judge, alongside being a licensed attorney.^[2] Their absence is partially credited to legal and institutional barriers such as immigration and naturalization policies, where scholars argue that policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Naturalization Act of 1790 limit access to judicial office by restricting immigration and paths to citizenship.^[3] The impacts of these policies is evident in cases like Hong Yen Chang's, a Chinese immigrant denied his law license in 1890. In 2015, the Supreme Court of California offered it to him, 89 years after his death, in a symbolic act.^[1]

The stereotyping and treatment of Asian Americans as "perpetual foreigners" also participate in affecting representation.^[4] Scholars argue that these barriers, when coupled with limited access to education and the restrictive legal pipeline, have been used to exclude Asian Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the mid to late twentieth century, civil rights reforms expanded educational access to minorities and Asian American representation began to increase. The Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 and the 1974 Supreme Court Case Lau v. Nichols are examples of such reforms. The EEOA mandated a bilingual education, and Lau v. Nichols ruled that if a school failed to teach English to non-English speaking students of Chinese descent, they violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.^[5] Alongside these reforms, affirmative action policies, such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, expanded access to higher education by limiting the consideration of race in admissions. While these measures contributed to increased Asian American enrollment in law and other professional fields, scholars argue that their effects were uneven and did not translate into proportional gains in representation within the judiciary.^[6]

The selection systems in the United States, where judges are chosen through elections or appointments, are argued to rely on executive discretion and professional networks that reward name recognition and political experience.^[7] Asian Americans' underrepresentation in these public sector roles has limited access to both appointed and elected judicial positions.^[8] Research shows that judges typically gain experience in the public sector, such as serving as prosecutors or elected officials, before they are appointed or elected to the judiciary. As of 2020, Asian Americans entered government positions at 7.5% and judicial clerkships at 7.2% of participants, the lowest rates of any racial group.^[8] Representation in the private sector, however, is much higher as they represent the largest minority group in major law firms.^[8]

Asian American representation in the judiciary appeared decades after they entered the legal profession. Early appointments were primarily constrained to lower court levels, such as local and state trial courts. Some scholars call these appointments symbolic rather than reflections of structural change, noting that these appointments did not change overall patterns of representation and were representative of demographic change instead.^[9] Scholars claim that the demographic makeup of a population is a driving force of representation for Asian Americans, pointing to Asian American judges being more common in states with larger Asian American populations. Scholars explain these patterns by claiming larger populations increase visibility and professional networks, in turn leading to higher rates of appointment. States such as New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii all contain the highest populations of Asian Americans in the United States, and subsequently have held more Asian American jurists than other states. As of November 2025, 42 states have no Asian American jurists.^[10]

At the federal level research shows that representation increased later compared to the state level, with growth accelerating in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Within the courts, representation also varies across the trial, appellate, and supreme courts.^[11] Although representation is growing, it remains lower relative to the population and the share of the legal profession that Asians occupy, and they are still one of the least represented racial groups within the judiciary.^[11]

Studies led by California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu (2017)^[12][13] and the Center for American Progress (2019)^[14] provided in-depth statistics into the issue.

• List of first minority male lawyers and judges in the United States
• List of first women lawyers and judges in the United States
• List of African American jurists
• List of Hispanic and Latino American jurists
• List of Jewish American jurists
• List of LGBT jurists in the United States
• List of Native American jurists