Week 3 Margaret Fung As Executive Director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), Margaret Fung is actively engaged in fostering a wide spectrum of legal rights for Asian Americans. A graduate of Barnard College in New York City, Margaret Fung earned her law degree from New York University, where she was a member of the NYU Law Review, an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow and a Root-Tilden Scholar. Fung also received an honorary LL.D. from City University of New York (CUNY) Law School in 1997. Over 10,000 Asian Americans benefit yearly from legal counseling and community programs provided by AALDEF, which is a nonpartisan organization formed in 1974 to protect and promote the civil rights of Asian Americans, through litigation, education, and legal advocacy. Under Fung's leadership, AALDEF has successfully defended the civil rights of members of the Asian-American community nationwide in areas including voting, housing, and economic justice for workers. A staff of 10, including six attorneys, helps reform immigration policy, stamp out sweatshops and combat anti-Asian violence and police misconduct. A landmark ruling from the New York Court of Appeals that Fung won in 1986 required that the impact of new development on low-income tenants and small businesses be considered under state environmental laws. That case, Chinese Staff and Workers Association v. City of New York, blocked construction of a proposed high rise condominium in Manhattan's Chinatown. That case has been used as a legal precedent by other groups challenging the effects of displacement in their neighborhoods. Margaret Fung organized AALDEF's first exit poll of Asian-American voters in New York City in 1988. These multilingual voter surveys have been conducted in every major election since then. AALDEF documented Asian-American voting patterns by conducting over 5,000 multi-lingual exit polls in the presidential election in 2000. In April 1992, Fung was invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the Voting Rights Language Assistance Act, which requires providing bilingual ballots and assistance to voters. Her powerful advocacy led to the passage of the Act and to the first fully translated Chinese-language ballots in New York City for the 1994 elections. This effort provided bilingual ballots to over 200,000 Asian Americans nationwide. In her testimony before the New York State Legislative Task Force for Demographic Research and Reapportionment in 2001, Fung presented information on AALDEF's challenge of previous redistricting plans that diluted minority voting strength, leading to the disenfranchisement of Asian Americans. Although New York City has the nation's largest Asian-American population, at that time no Asian American had ever been elected to the New York State Legislature or the New York City Council. Objections were filed with the Justice Department because Manhattan's Chinatown was divided between two state assembly districts, which diluted the voting strength of the Asian-American community. Fung implored the Task Force to take seriously its obligation to comply fully with the Voting Rights Act. In AALDEF's successful case against a Manhattan restaurant that refused service to a Princeton University professor who wore a turban because he is a Sikh, Margaret Fung addressed the issue of religious intolerance. As a member of the Board of Directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Margaret Fung has worked to alleviate police brutality. She was appointed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to serve on the Mayor's Task Force on Police/Community Relations, which was formed after the police torture of Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima. Governor Mario Cuomo also selected her to serve on the New York State Temporary Commission on Constitutional Revision. Fung also serves on the boards of directors of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, the National Association of Public Interest Law, and the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy. In her work on Community Board #1 in Lower Manhattan, she plays an advisory role in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site after the September 11 tragedy. Named one of the nation's "20 Lawyers Making a Difference" by the American Bar Association in 1992, she has also won awards from the Asian-American Bar Association of New York, the Asian-American Lawyers Association of Massachusetts, and NYU Law School. She received the "I Love an Ethical New York" award from Common Cause. The American Bar Association salutes Margaret Fung and her outstanding achievements in protecting the legal rights of Asian Americans. Photo Usage: Photo used with permission of Margaret Fung. Asian Pacifican American Heritage Month 2002 | Links