CEB Profile of the Hon. Ken M. Kawaichi (Ret.)

Helping People and Preserving Rights
The Hon. Ken M. Kawaichi (Ret.)
Susan Godstone, E-mail: sgodstone@attglobal.net

From activist to judge to arbitrator and mediator, the Honorable Ken M. Kawaichi (Ret.) has enjoyed a career of notable accomplishment, one infused with his commitment to expanding access to the law and increasing the participation of minorities. Kawaichi’s success is marked not only by a distinguished career at the bar and on the bench, but by his stature as a role model in the Asian-American community.

“He showed young Asian-American students who really didn’t consider the law as an option in the early days that it was possible to practice law and, in particular, public interest law,” said Dale Minami, a personal injury and entertainment attorney who has known Kawaichi for many years.

Appointed in 1980 by then Governor Jerry Brown, Kawaichi was the first Asian-American Judge in Alameda County. Recently retired from the Alameda Superior Court, he spent 28 years on the bench. He continues his commitment to the legal community and to improving access to the law in his present capacity as a neutral for JAMS, a dispute resolution service in downtown San Francisco.

“One of the reasons that he was particularly interested in joining JAMS was his admiration for the JAMS Foundation that was created to provide greater access to justice, in particular, Alternative Dispute Resolution aspects of justice,” said retired Judge Harry Low, also a neutral at JAMS.

One does not have to delve too deeply into Kawaichi’s past to understand the source of his desire to help people and his sensitivity to the rights of individuals. He was born in Los Angeles at the beginning of World War II, the son of Japanese immigrants. When he was only 4 months old, his family was forced to relocate to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona. To remove himself and his family from the camp, his father, a doctor, volunteered for the U.S. Army. The family was then moved to Kansas and his father was sent out to Italy. After the war, his father returned to Kansas, where the family lived for 10 years before returning to Los Angeles.

Kawaichi explains with a wry smile that as a result of the relocation, his father had little respect for lawyers and was none too happy about his son’s desire to enter the law. “He wanted me to become a plumber, or a carpenter, something honest …Understandably, he felt that an injustice had been done. So he was not pleased when I went to law school.” His father did come around in the end and got to see him appointed to the bench.

Kawaichi entered Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkeley in 1966. “There really wasn’t an Asian legal community in those days,” said Kawaichi. He and his friends set out to create one. In the early seventies, he and a group of like-minded people, including Dale Minami, formed the Asian Law Caucus. The Caucus grew out of the Third World Strike at Berkeley, in 1969, when a coalition of minority campus groups struck for a student-controlled Ethnic Studies Department, resulting in one of the first Ethnic Studies Departments in the U.S. Kawaichi jokes about how Asian Law Caucus meetings in the early days were always well attended and largely revolved around pizza and beer.

In the late 1980s, members of the Asian Law Caucus formed part of the legal team on Korematsu v United States. This case overturned the 1944 conviction of a Japanese-American, Fred Korematsu, who resisted internment during World War II. Although Kawaichi was not involved because he was already a judge, many of his friends played a part. "The court had been deliberately or negligently misled into thinking that there were actual incidents of Japanese-American saboteurs or adventurers who were working against the U.S. There was no evidence," said Kawaichi, who sees similarities between what happened then and today’s Patriot Act and Patriot II.

Naming influential figures in his life, Kawaichi mentions his father-in-law, Stephen K. Tamura, who was a Justice of the 4th District Court of Appeal. According to Kawaichi he was highly respected, soft-spoken, and direct—traits that Kawaichi has been able to emulate.

Kawaichi has been an active member of the California Judges’ Association, the American Trial Lawyers’ Association, the Asian Law Caucus, the American Judicature Society, the National Judicial College Faculty Council, the Mass Torts Litigation Committee, and the California Judicial Council (Committees: Civil and Small Claims, Task Force on Complex Litigation; Race and Ethnic Bias; Access and Fairness).

In 2004, as Chair of the Faculty for the National Judicial Council, he will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education (1954) in which the Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine of the Plessy v Ferguson decision, the foundation of school segregation. Kawaichi and his colleagues believe that schoolchildren no longer have a real grasp of what was behind those two major decisions. The 50th anniversary provides an opportunity to go into schools across the country and present materials showing how the decisions were made. Among other organizations, the National Judicial Council has agreed to get involved in this education outreach.

In 2002, Kawaichi was presented with the Benjamin Aranda III Access to Justice Award, given annually to a trial judge or appellate justice whose activities demonstrate a long-term commitment to improving access to the courts for low- and moderate-income Californians. He has chaired the Access and Fairness Committees of many organizations, including the Judicial Council and his own court. He sometimes questions the effectiveness of the access programs he has worked on; however, he’s encouraged that the Committees address issues of access and give people a way to ask for help. "The way I like to think about it is if we’ve denied one person access, we’ve denied access to everybody," he said.

How Kawaichi feels about justice and the legal system, and the values that he has passed onto a generation of Asian-American lawyers who have come up after him, is best summed up in his own words. “I’ve always believed that the system, the lawyers, and the judges ought to help people. You see some people and they are not trying to help. They are either trying to win their case or squash somebody else’s. I really don’t think that should be the root and soul of our system. I think it’s about helping people, preserving rights for all of us, not just the rich and powerful.”

Hon. Ken M. Kawaichi (Ret.)