Symposium

This symposium for AALJ is the first of its kind. In the past, the AALJ symposium has focused on specific issues affecting the Asian American community in the US. However, our symposium has never so broadly laid addressed racism against Asian Americans in today's society.

For our morning panel, we have invited esteemed academic legal and non-legal scholars to share their perspectives and research on how critical race theory applies to Asian Americans and how to reframe the discussion of race in the US from the traditional black/white paradigm. For our lunch talk, the Honorable Judge Edward Chen will discuss his journey to becoming one of the few Asian American judges in the federal judiciary. In our afternoon panel, the symposium will focus on how Asian Americans (both East and South Asians) encounter racism today, and how the Asian American movement at large is combating such racism. With the controversy surrounding Private Danny Chen's suicide, the ever-present post-9/11 racial profiling of South Asian Americans, and the hot-button issues raised amidst the "Lin-sanity" spreading across the US, now is the perfect time to discuss the intersection of racism (through both the lenses of academic legal theory and practice) and the Asian American movement in the 21st century.

For questions regarding the symposium, please contact Symposium Editor Eric Chen at ericbchen@berkeley.edu.