SAN FRANCISCO — Attorney and civil rights leader Dale Minami received the Citation Award, one of the highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, on May 2 at the Ritz-Carlton.
Minami, a partner with Minami Tamaki LLP specializing in personal injury and entertainment law, is the first Asian American to receive the award. It recognizes outstanding achievements by a UC Berkeley law school graduate who has made substantial contributions to the bar, the bench, legal scholarship and society.
Cisco Systems executive Mallun Yen and Professor Mel Eisenberg were also honored at the gala celebration, attended by more than 350 people.
“Dale’s tireless commitment to civil rights has been an inspiration to his fellow lawyers and to the many disenfranchised groups he has so brilliantly represented,” said Christopher Edley, Jr., dean of law at Berkeley. “His lifelong work as a champion of social justice fighting various forms of discrimination represents the very best of his profession, and is a shining example to everyone at Berkeley Law.”
Previous Citation Award recipients include: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren; California Supreme Court Justices Allen Broussard, Cruz Reynoso, Roger Traynor, and Matthew Tobriner; and U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson.
“Dale Minami brought the first employment discrimination class action on behalf of Asian Americans; the first lawsuit to stop the police from making mass arrests of young men in Chinatown because they might be gang members; the first tenure cases representing Asian American professors; and engineered the strategy leading to the appointment of the first Asian American judge in Alameda County, Ken Kawaichi,” said Minami’s law firm partner, Donald K. Tamaki, who introduced Minami at the event.
Tamaki and Minami worked together on Korematsu v. United States, a lawsuit that overturned a 40-year-old conviction for refusal to obey exclusion orders aimed at Japanese Americans during World War II, and originally upheld by the U.S Supreme Court in landmark decisions.
Minami has been recognized as one of the top personal injury lawyers in the Bay Area, as well as a Top 100 Super Lawyer by Law & Politics magazine, a Top Lawyer in the Bay Area in the Personal Injury category by Bay Area Lawyer Magazine, and one of the Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America.