Asian-Pacific American Heritage
Stephen began writing about Asian-American legal history after hearing about an 1850s murder case that resulted in an infamous opinion by the California Supreme Court. Stephen went through California archives to learn more about what happened in the case, and his article about the case has been used in law-school classes. In 2023, he wrote a monthlong series of articles about Asian-American legal history, and he then co-wrote the scripts for re-enactments by the Asian American Bar Association of Greater Chicago, the Federal Bar Association Chicago Chapter, and the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois of the Wen Ho Lee case on its 25 anniversary in 2025 and the real-life story of an Asian American lawyer who lost her citizenship because of the man she married and then regained it. Stephen also spoke at the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association in 2024 about Takuji Yamashita, a civil rights pioneer who was not allowed to become a lawyer back in 1902 because he was not “white” under the law.
Stephen served as president of the Asian American Bar Association of Greater Chicago for the 2025-26 bar year.
Loving v. Virginia: The JACL Argues for Interracial Marriage
When the United States Supreme Court held in 1967 that bans on interracial marriages were unconstitutional, a Japanese American civil rights group helped win this victory. In the 1960s, Virginia was one of 17 states that banned interracial marriages. Virginia’s ban declared that “all marriages between a white person and a colored person shall be absolutely void without any decree of divorce or other legal process,” and defined “white” as a person “who has no trace of whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.”