Congratulations to Hon. Peggy Kuo, United States Magistrate Judge, Eastern District of New York, who was honored on March 3 at the Association of Asian American Yale Alumni’s 9th Annual Lunar New Year Banquet held at Golden Unicorn Restaurant in Chinatown.

AABANY co-founder and Norman Lau Kee Trailblazer Award recipient Rocky Chin introduced Judge Kuo and presented the award to her. Among the AABANY leaders in attendance were Yale alums Dwight Yoo, AABANY President-elect, and Larry Wee, AABANY Director and Co-Chair of the Corporate Law Committee.

Proceeds from the evening’s event will fund two Community Service Fellowships for Yale students interning at the Museum of Chinese in America and MinKwon Center this summer.

Here is Judge Kuo’s bio from the event program:

Magistrate Judge Kuo was appointed on October 9, 2015. She received a B.A. summa cum laude in history from Yale University in 1985 and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1988.

Judge Kuo clerked for the Honorable Judith W. Rogers with the D.C. Court of Appeals. From 1989 until 1993, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia. From 1994 to 1998, she was a trial attorney and then Acting Deputy Chief of the Civil Rights Division Criminal Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she investigated and prosecuted hate crimes and allegations of police misconduct throughout the United States. From 1998 to 2002, Judge Kuo prosecuted war crimes and crimes against humanity at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. Her historic trial regarding mass rape in Bosnia became the subject of the documentary film, “I Came To Testify,” part of the series Women, War & Peace.

Upon her return to New York, Judge Kuo became litigation counsel at Wilmer Hale, LLP. In 2005, she was appointed Chief Hearing Officer at the New York Stock Exchange, where she presided over hearings involving violations of federal securities laws. From 2011 until her appointment to the bench, she was Deputy Commissioner and General Counsel of the New York City Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, the largest municipal tribunal in the country.

Judge Kuo was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States at the age of three. She was awarded a German Chancellor Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1993 to study the German criminal justice system. She is President of the Federal Bar Council American Inn of Court, an active member of the Asian American Bar Association of New York, and former Vice-Chair of Manhattan Legal Services.

Please join us in extending our congratulations to Judge Kuo on this recognition.