After law school, I moved to L.A. to practice with a large law firm. While in practice, I served on the Board and was President of the Berkeley Law Alumni Association and was Chair of Bet Tzedek Legal Services. In 2008, I was elected President of the State Bar of California, then the largest unified bar in the country. In 2011, I was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown (who had signed both my undergrad and law school diplomas!) to the Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, where I now preside over an unlimited jurisdiction civil courtroom.

I am Past President of the California Asian Pacific American Judges Association, I teach at the National Judicial College and I am a member of the American Law Institute. I have received the Alumna of the Year award from the California Law Review, the “Breaking the Glass Ceiling” award of the Leadership Institute for Women of Color Attorneys and the National Association of Women Judges’ Joan Dempsey Klein Distinguished Jurist Award. I married my law school Moot Court Advisor, Lee Cotugno, and we have two children, author/animator Sage and L.A. Deputy Public Defender Thomas.

Cal is both a huge, world class university and a place with many opportunities for small group interaction. Although both my majors, Political Science and Economics, were large departments, I mostly took small seminars with globally - renowned professors like the amazing Professor Sandy Muir, who won the Distinguished Teaching Award when I was an undergrad. In addition, my classmates were from so many different backgrounds and they had so many experiences that were far from my own that I learned just from meeting and talking to them, both in class and outside. I met people at Cal I would never have met anywhere else. The breadth requirement led me to explore languages and other humanities subjects, since both my majors were in the social sciences, and living in Berkeley was an experience in itself!

I grew up in Oakland, and I ended up babysitting for many Cal faculty members as a high school student and undergrad. So my favorite Cal memory is my Political Science graduation, where I was greeted joyfully after getting my diploma by the entire front row of the audience, which included many of my faculty babysitting clients, including Prof. Ken Jowitt, father of Cullen, and our graduation speaker, Professor Robert Middlekauff, father of Sam and Holly!

_{Cal is an amazing place - experience all you can both on campus and in the Bay Area. I look at the course catalog these days and marvel at the things I could have learned. Take classes in areas you never thought of before. Talk to professors and students with different backgrounds and in other areas of study and learn about their lives. Keep an open mind. Do not hesitate to contact alums in any field that interests you to ask them about their careers. Especially in places outside the Bay Area, Cal alums are always delighted to hear from Cal students and other alums and to share their expertise and advice. When I was a student, I never reached out to lawyers or judges because I was always worried that I was bothering them, and I missed out on so much I could have learned from them. Use the huge Cal alumni base as a resource!}