Asian Americans at the Supreme Court: Why I Built This

I started researching the history of Asian Americans at the Supreme Court over a decade ago, for two reasons that turned out to be the same reason.

The first was personal. By the time Matal v. Tam reached the Supreme Court, I'd spent years living inside a single case, and I wanted to understand where it actually sat in a longer story. Who else had stood where I was standing? What had the Court already decided, decades before I filed a trademark application, about what an Asian American's name, identity, or word was allowed to mean? When looking for that context, I found a lot more of it than I expected (and also, not nearly as much as I hoped I would).

The second reason has nothing to do with my own case. I've always been a civic historian by temperament, the kind of person who can't read about one Supreme Court decision without wanting to know what came before it and what it broke open afterward. Some of that early research made its way into my memoir. Most of it didn't fit there, and over the following years I kept going anyway, for a different project that got shelved before it was finished. I talked with judges, attorneys, legal scholars, and community activists along the way, people who'd lived parts of this history directly or had spent their careers studying it. That research eventually became this new project.

What This Actually Is

Asian Americans at the Supreme Court: A Living History, Case by Case is a free, ongoing resource tracing over 150 years of Supreme Court cases that shaped what it means to be Asian American in this country, and a few cases that shaped that history without an Asian American attached at all.

Unlike most legal or historical textbooks, it's organized by question, not by date. The Court has asked some version of the same thing for a century and a half: “Does America belong to Asian Americans on the same terms it belongs to everyone else?” The answer has never moved in a straight line. Grouping the cases by what they were actually asking, rather than marching through them chronologically, allows us to make that pattern visible instead of just listing it.

Each case gets a short teaser on the main resource page, and a longer, standalone piece behind it, two to five thousand words, fully sourced, built the same way regardless of how famous or obscure the case is. Some of these cases, Korematsu, Loving, and the case that's actually mine, are well known. Others like the habeas corpus cases that quietly narrowed Chinese immigrants' access to the courts between 1895 and 1905 and the Oyama family's fight to keep a farm registered in their citizen son's name, have almost no public memory at all, despite mattering just as much to the people who lived them.

Why It's Different

There are real books and real scholarship on this subject already, and I've tried to credit them generously rather than pretend I'm working in a vacuum. What I couldn't find, anywhere, was a single place built specifically for a general reader, not a law student, not a specialist, that treats the people at the center of these cases as the actual subject, rather than as footnotes to the doctrine.

So that's the rule I tried to hold myself to throughout. Every piece centers the plaintiff, the family, the community, first. The legal holding matters, and I've tried to get it right with real rigor, real citations, real fact-checking, but it's never the starting point. Where a plaintiff's own voice survives, in an interview, a letter, a deposition, it's in the piece. Where it doesn't survive at all, and for several of the earliest immigration cases, almost nothing personal survives, I've said so directly instead of inventing texture that isn't there. The absence is part of the history too.

I also tried to be honest about complexity instead of writing around it. Some of the people in this history made choices I find difficult and disagreeable, not heroic. Some communities were bitterly divided about strategy in ways that only look unified in hindsight. Some "wins" turned out to be narrower, or shorter-lived, than they looked on the day they were decided. I didn't smooth any of that over, because I don't think a true history of this subject can afford to. The other people who I’ve met who’ve had cases before the Supreme Court (yes, we sometimes talk) all have different relationships with our cases and stories - some are proud, some would rather move on.

What's Here Now, and What's Coming

There are twelve pieces live right now, organized into three parts: a core arc of cases where Asian American plaintiffs directly tested what the Constitution owed them; a second set tracing narrower questions of proof, property, and procedure that didn't fit the first arc but mattered just as much; and a third set of cases that never had an Asian American name on them at all, but shaped this history anyway, sometimes by what they built, sometimes by what they deliberately avoided deciding.

This is a living resource, not a finished one. I'll keep adding to it as new cases reach the Court, and as I find more of the history that's still missing. If you're a teacher, a student, a lawyer, or just someone who got curious, it's yours to use, cite, and share. That was the whole point of building it this way instead of putting it behind a paywall or saving it for a book.

The resource lives here. I hope you find it useful.