Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month
May 7, 2021
In Celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, the firm will highlight a significant figure within the Asian American and Pacific Islander community during each week of May. The people highlighted come from various backgrounds but share the experience of being trailblazers within their communities. We stand in solidarity and unity with the AAPI community. We will continue to stand up for what matters, aligning with Eckert Seamans’ core values of respect, representation, inclusion, and belonging.
Please join us as we acknowledge and learn more about AAPI Legal Trailblazers during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month:
Hong Yen Chang
Hong Yen Chang was born in 1859-60 in Xiangshan, Zhejiang, (formerly Guangdong) Province, China. When he was just 10 years old, his father passed away, and only two years later, he was chosen to be a part of the Chinese Education Mission and traveled to the United States, where he would live with American families. From 1876-1878, he attended Hartford Public High School in Connecticut. In 1878, he transferred to Phillips Academy in Andover, graduating in 1879 and delivering an English oration at his commencement called “The Influence of Greece beyond Greece.” In the fall of that same year, he enrolled at Yale. Before completing his studies, in 1881 he was called by the Chinese Government to return the country (which recalled all of the Chinese Educational Mission Students).
In 1883, Hong Yen Chang returned to the United States and enrolled at Columbia Law School, graduating with honors in 1886, earning very high grades and a unanimous recommendation for bar admission. At that time, the New York State Bar required applicants to be citizens of the United States, and the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chang from obtaining citizenship. The New York State Supreme Court initially declined his admission to the New York State Bar, despite Chang being naturalized before their decision on November 11, 1887. The following year, the New York State Legislature passed an act that allowed Hong Yen Chang to re-apply to the bar.
Hong Yen Chang was admitted to the New York State Bar on May 17, 1888 and the New York Times hailed him as the first Chinese Lawyer in the United States to be admitted to the bar. Not long after his admission, Chang moved to California and applied for admission there, entering a motion to practice law in California, which reached the California Supreme Court in 1890. To further support his motion, he submitted his license to practice in New York along with his certificate of naturalization, which the California Supreme Court found invalid under the Chinese Exclusion Act and served as part of their reasoning to deny his motion.
Between 1888 and 1895, Hong Yen Chang worked as an advisor for the Chinese Consulate and the Yokohama Specie Bank of Japan, both in San Francisco. In 1897, he married Charlotte Ah Tye, and in 1907, the family left San Francisco and returned to China, where Chang became the Accountant General to the national treasury’s Shanghai branch. Shortly after, he earned an appointment to a chair at a prominent university where he taught banking and international law.
In 2011, 121 years later, members of the UC Davis Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, along with Professor Gabriel Chin, petitioned the Supreme Court of California to posthumously grant Hong Yen Chang admission to the California State Bar. The court granted the petition on March 16, 2015 (link to the decision).
On January 1, 2021, Columbia Law School began operating the Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies.
The Honorable Cathy Bissoon
Cathy Bissoon was born on May 16, 1968 in Brooklyn, New York, to a Puerto Rican father and an Indian-Trinidadian mother. When she was only four years old, her father was killed in a stabbing attack near their home. Her mother ultimately remarried, and the family relocated to Queens. Judge Bissoon stayed in New York for her undergraduate studies at Alfred University, graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 1990. She went on to earn her Juris Doctorate from Harvard in 1993.
Upon completing her law degree, Bissoon moved to Pittsburgh, where she joined Reed Smith’s Labor & Employment Group. While there, she took a year-long “sabbatical” from private practice, during which she clerked for Judge Gary L. Lancaster of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. After her clerkship, she returned to Reed Smith, where she became a partner and, eventually, chaired the firm’s Labor & Employment Group. Bissoon also served as Reed Smith’s Director of Diversity for six years, earning various accolades for her efforts to increase diversity within the legal profession. Most notably, she was recognized for her many efforts in the area of diversity with the Honorable Thurgood Marshall award from Minorities in Business Magazine. In 2007, Bissoon joined Cohen & Grigsby, where she served as the Director of the firm’s Labor & Employment Group.
In 2008, Bissoon was selected to serve as United States Magistrate Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, cementing her spot as the first woman of color to sit on the federal bench in Pittsburgh. She also became the first woman of Hispanic and Indian descent to sit on a federal court of the United States. After strong recommendations from Pennsylvania Senators Arlen Specter and Bob Casey, Judge Bissoon was formally nominated to be a United States district court judge by President Barack Obama. Eleven months later, in a vote of 82-3, Judge Bissoon was confirmed by the Senate. Upon her appointment to the bench in October 2011, Judge Bissoon again made history, becoming the first Hispanic and Asian-American Article III judge in Pennsylvania and the first South Asian American female Article III judge in the United States.
During her time in private practice, Judge Bissoon had the honor of serving, upon appointment by the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, as an original member of Pennsylvania’s Interbranch Commission for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness, which is charged with promoting the equal application of the law for all citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and increasing public confidence in the fairness of all three branches of state government. The Commission evaluates and recommends measures to reduce or eliminate bias or invidious discrimination within all branches of government and within the legal profession. She also sits as one of the Court’s designated patent judges and is one of the founding members of the Q. Todd Dickinson Intellectual Property American Inn of Court and received the Linn Alliance Distinguished Service Medal in 2017 for her work with Dickinson Inn, where she was elected as its first president.
Additionally, through the years, Judge Bissoon has been very active in The Sedona Conference, a nonprofit research and educational institute dedicated to the advanced study of law in a variety of complex litigation settings. In addition to sitting on various working groups and TSC’s Diversity Committee, Judge Bissoon serves as a member of TSC’s Judicial Advisory Board, which offers strategic advice to TSC, identifies thought leaders to serve as dialogue leaders and authors, and provides editorial review for certain TSC commentaries and journal submissions.
Dalip Singh Saund (“Judge”)
Dalip Singh Saund (who everyone simply called “Judge,”) was born on September 20, 1899 in Chhajulwadi, Amritsar District, Punjab Province, British India. His family was Indian Punjabi Sikh, and they were industrious and successful believers and participants in Sikh reformism and activism. Saund remained strong in his faith and activism throughout his life. After attending local schools, financed by his father and uncles, Saund graduated from the University of Punjab in 1919 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
Upon completing his studies, Saund immigrated to the United States, entering through the renowned port at Ellis Island, with a plan to study agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley. Saund had persuaded his family to support his move to America by promising to study food canning in America, with the intent of returning to India and starting a canning industry there. Saund began his studies at the College of Agriculture. His studies were sponsored by Gurdwara Sahib Stockton, the “first permanent Sikh American settlement and Gurdwara in the United States” in Stockton, California. Saund stayed in a residence that housed many refugees and visitors from India to California, several of whom arrived after WWI as agricultural laborers. Saund became active in the Hindustani Association of America at Berkeley, and after two years, was elected its national president. He spent his summers working for canneries like McNeill, McNeill, and Libby, and the California Packing Company (Del Monte). Saund also took courses in mathematics and, upon invitation by the department, ultimately switched his major. He earned a master’s degree in 1922 and a Ph.D. in 1924, both from UC Berkeley in mathematics.
Despite his field of study, Saund decided to pursue his original goal of agriculture. In 1928, he married Marian Kosa, and together they raised three children. Two years after their marriage, the Gurdwara commissioned Saund to author a book called “My Mother India,” which supported the Indian Independence Movement that the Gurdwara contributed heavily towards. Saund himself wrote that his work was planned to “answer various questions that commonly arise in the minds of the American people regarding the cultural and political problems of India.” He focused specifically on the caste system as a central question, arguing for the rights of the “downtrodden” in India, comparing the caste system to racism experienced in America and elsewhere across the globe. Saund was inspired by the writings of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt, and was particularly moved by the works of Mohandas Gandhi and his non-violent movement for independence.
Saund continued his campaign for increased rights for South Asian peoples, later campaigning for people of South Asian descent to become naturalized citizens. When the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 passed, which provided a quota of 100 Filipinos and 100 Indians to immigrate to the United States per year and become naturalized citizens, Saund applied for naturalization and was granted citizenship in 1949. He ran for Justice of the Peace in 1950 and won, but the results were thrown out because he had been a citizen for less than one year. He later successfully ran for the same seat.
In 1955, Saund announced his intention to run for the United States House of Representatives and ultimately won the seat in 1956 against Jacqueline Cochran. Saund was re-elected to the post twice and became the first Sikh American, the first Asian American, the first Indian American, and the first member of a non-Abrahamic faith to be elected to Congress.
In 1962, Saund suffered a severe stroke mid-flight, and was rendered unable to talk or walk without aid. Despite his inability to campaign, he won the primary but lost the November general election. Saund’s condition improved a bit after that race, and he was able to be moved from the hospital in Bethesda, Maryland back home to California. Saund endured a second stroke 10 years later and died from its complications on April 22, 1973.
Wendy Nicole Duong
Wendy Nicole Duong was born in Hoi An, Vietnam, to parents who were both language professors. When she was 16, Duong and her family escaped the Fall of Saigon by cargo plane, just three days before the collapse of the Republic of South Vietnam. Set to graduate from high school that same year, Duong fled shortly after winning South Vietnam’s Presidential Honor Prize in Literature and was poised to be appointed the National Valedictorian by the Ministry of Education for her perfect GPA and place on the national ranking scale.
After arriving in the United States with her family, Duong attended Southern Illinois University on a scholarship, majored in journalism, minored in French and Vietnamese comparative literature, and graduated summa cum laude. She also became the first person who was not born in the United States who served as the editor for the campus newspaper.
After graduating, Duong worked for an advertising firm in Houston, Texas, and decided to pursue a career in law. She enrolled at the University of Houston Law Center, graduated cum laude, and earned the Jurisprudence Award in constitutional law. While there, she worked full-time as the Executive Director of Risk Management for the Houston Independent School District, cementing her place as the first Asian-American woman to serve the district in an executive position. She also became the first Vietnam-born lawyer to clerk for the federal court in Texas. She went on to earn her LL.M., with a straight-A transcript and published thesis on gender studies from Harvard Law School.
Upon graduation, Duong relocated to Washington, D.C., and joined Wilmer Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale), where she represented Vietnamese refugees pro bono. In 1991, she earned a spot as a regional finalist representing southwestern states for the White House Fellowship but withdrew her application due to federal employment restrictions. She served as a special trial attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission Office of the General Counsel in Washington, D.C. She was recognized by the agency, earning several outstanding lawyer performance awards.
In 1992, she was appointed as Associate Municipal Judge for the City of Houston and Magistrate for the State of Texas. The American Bar Association of New York City honored her among “Pioneer Women of Color in the Judiciary.” After serving a three-year term, she continued her career, working as an international lawyer and corporate in-house counsel for Mobil. She handled the “Blue Dragon” oil exploration contract offshore of Vietnam, becoming the first Vietnam-born lawyer to join their Major Transaction Group. While working in private practice, Duong led a team of lawyers exploring Y2K liability exposure for the international assets of an energy company.
Duong’s career has also been celebrated for its many facets. In her youth, she attended the American Academy for Dramatic Arts and auditioned for the debut of the musical Miss Saigon in New York City and Los Angeles. She also authored and published several essays across law, art, culture, technology, human rights, and gender studies. One of a group of Vietnamese American artists, Duong, is the only one who writes and publishes bilingually. In 2001, she became a professor of corporate and international law at the University of Denver. Duong was a Fulbright Core Program Legal Scholar to Asia and a Fulbright Legal Specialist to Russia, eventually combining her legal and writing careers to publish her historical fiction trilogy, the third of which, Mimi and Her Mirror, won the Multicultural Fiction International Book Award in 2012. Duong currently resides in Houston, where she practices law and writes full-time.