Thursday, February 25, 2021

Dj profiles 1/3's Justice Fujisaki

Today's DJ profile is Inside Insight: Appellate Justice Carin Fujisaki worked at the State Supreme Court for nearly 30 years.

  • Fujisaki grew up in Los Angeles. Her mother worked at the RAND Corp. and her father, Hiroshi Fujisaki, was a deputy public defender and later Los Angeles County Superior Court judge best known for presiding over the wrongful death lawsuit against O.J. Simpson.
  • Fujisaki's parents and grandparents had been swept up in one of the United States' most infamous and overt periods of discrimination: All were among the approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in concentration camps set up by the government during World War II.
  • As a young attorney, Carin T. Fujisaki was drawn to the work of the judiciary. Her first job out of law school was in the civil law and motion department at the San Francisco County Superior Court. After a few years as a litigation associate at the law firm Howard Rice, she moved to the California Supreme Court and didn't leave for almost three decades.
  • Fujisaki worked on the court's Civil Central Staff, in the chambers of now retired Justice Marvin R. Baxter, and as principal attorney to Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye. She always loved research and writing and said working within the court system was an "opportunity for me to fulfill my sense of public service with the strongest skills I had."
  • Outside the courtroom, Fujisaki plays an active role in judicial administration, serving as an advisory member of the Judicial Council, as vice chair of a working group on how the courts can help address the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on homelessness in the state, and as a member of a group charged with addressing bias in court proceedings.