Attorneys' Advocate

Fujioka: "We're at a point where we have seen the firsts and seconds who have made it."

The APA Bar Association adopts an activist agenda

BY JAMES CARROLL

When Oakland Deputy City Attorney Margaret Fujioka was a student learning about Asian history at UC Berkeley, a group of Asian American lawyers across the bay were making some history of their own prosecuting cases related to the redress movement.

"I was so impressed by their tenacity and their courage and their compassion," recalls Fujioka, "that I saw that lawyers have a chance to make an enormous impact on society." It's a lesson she took to heart.

This week Fujioka takes the lead of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) at the group's ninth annual meeting at the ANA Hotel in San Francisco where some 600 attorneys gather for three days of seminars, speeches, and networking. It's the largest and, in several ways most ambitious conference the group has ever sponsored--an indication, Fujioka says, of the coming of age in a profession long regarded as a bastion of the old-boy network.

"We're at a point where we have seen the firsts and seconds who have made it--the Gary Lockes and the Ming Chins," referring to the governor of Washington state and the California Superior Court Justice, respectively. "That is a trend. Our members are becoming law-firm partners, they are becoming tenured professors, they are becoming heads of nonprofits and assuming positions of power that they haven't reached before."

Surveys confirm Fujioka's observations. In 1996, there were 1,750 Asian Americans at the 250 largest firms in the country, making APAs the largest minority group in the profession according to statistics compiled by the National Law Journal. And at many universities with large APA student populations, there is a decline in the number of students majoring in the hard sciences and an increase in the professions, including law.

Still, while Asian Americans may be better represented at the top firms than other minorities, their numbers in ranks of power are considerably smaller. It's a situation Fujioka says is changing.

"There are major strides being made in the profession, but that's not to say that the glass ceiling is gone because I don't believe that it is," Fujioka notes. "There is, however, a whole group of young partners who are rising within the ranks of power in their firms. If you compare that to just 10 years ago there is a marked difference."

Fujioka herself didn't plan on a career in law. A Los Angeles native, she studied East Asian studies at UC Berkeley and was considering graduate work when she chose a career path. "It was either to go get a master's in East Asian studies and teach or go into the law. I chose the latter after I went to Japan to study for a year and discovered that I could do more as an individual to make changes as a lawyer than a professor."

That motivation is inspired in part by Fujioka's parents, second-generation Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. Her mother was at Manzanar in California and her father at Heart Mountain in Wyoming.

"I had talked to them about that experience and the upheaval and taking of property and all of the things that went along with that time. It made me feel that these are things that people should be aware--not to just be educated about but to take an active role in their communities so that these types of things don't ever happen again."

She received her law degree from Hastings College in 1982 and worked first as a clerk in the Berkeley City Attorney's Office, then as an investigator in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and the Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board. In 1986, she joined the Oakland City Attorney's Office, where she serves as deputy city attorney and where, she says, the commitment to diversity is so strong that it may be one of the most diverse offices in the state and possibly even the nation.

"I feel very lucky," Fujioka says of the environment. "It's unique." And unlike the demands of an associate's job at a private law firm, her position allows her time to care for her two young children. Her husband, Cedric Chao, is a partner at the prominent San Francisco law firm, Morrison & Foerster.

Fujioka assumes the NAPABA presidency at a particularly promising but stressful time for the organization, the profession, and for Asian America generally. Her plan is to increase the visibility of the organization in Washington, D.C., and communities around the country to lobby for more judicial and political appointments and recruit new members. In short, to give it a more activist role.

"We feel that attorneys and judges and lawyers and law students are in a particular position to influence policy," Fujioka says. "We move in society at a different level than ordinary citizens because we are so close to the law and we have ways to shape it."

She believes NAPABA, which claims a national network of 10,000 members and 35 affiliated local bar associations and chapters, is in a unique position to guide the debate on some of the most contentious issues, including affirmative action, APA political influence, and professional ethics.

Earlier this month, the organization issued a statement in support of Bill Lann Lee, the president's still unconfirmed nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights.

She believes that, "If there were more senators and congressmen of APA decent, the story [on the nomination] would be quite different."

Which is where another provocative panel on NAPABA's convention agenda, "Asian Political Influence: Myth or Reality?" comes in.

"I see very competent and what are rising stars on the political scene, but I would like to see more of them," Fujioka says. "We're a force that has not reached its full potential yet, and it can't happen soon enough."

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