By Michael Fisch
law community
Judge Myong J. Joun, JD ’99, has been nominated by President Biden to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. If approved by the U.S. Senate, he would become the third Suffolk Law graduate to be confirmed to a federal judgeship in recent years, joining U.S. District Judge (RI) Mary McElroy, JD ’92, and Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Gustavo Gelpí, Jr., JD ’91, HLLD ’06. Joun would be the first Asian-American man on the federal bench in Massachusetts.
A veteran of the U.S. Army and the Massachusetts National Guard, Joun has served as an associate justice on the Boston Municipal Court (BMC) since 2014, after having been nominated to the position by former Governor Deval Patrick.
Serge Georges, Jr., JD ’96, HLLD ’21, associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, worked alongside Judge Joun on the bench of the BMC for six years. Georges was inspired by Joun’s strengths as a jurist.
“When you do this job, you start to notice what can go wrong with a judge’s courtroom management. Temperatures and emotions run high in our courtrooms, resulting at times in judges being curt and impatient—sometimes leading to reflexive decision-making. That’s not how Judge Joun operates,” he says. “He has the classic judicial temperament and approach—unflappable, extremely well-prepared, deliberate, and analytical. It doesn’t matter what role you play in the court system—Judge Joun will treat you consistently with respect. He’s going to make a great federal district court judge.”
In his testimony before the Massachusetts Governor’s Council (when he was nominated to the BMC), Joun told the story of his family’s immigration from Korea to New York when Joun was 4 years old. His father took a job at a leather handbag factory and his mother in a garment factory. He was the first in his family to graduate from elementary school, which the family celebrated with Big Macs at McDonald’s. After his parents separated, he lived with his mother and siblings in a New York City shelter for six months.
Joun called the BMC “a multidimensional court that needs multidimensional judges. It has courts full of civil and criminal cases where social, human, and legal problems intersect. I lived through many of those same problems. Equality and fairness before the law isn’t simply a legal principle to me. It’s my entire reason for becoming a lawyer.”
As an attorney at Howard Friedman, PC, from 1999 to 2007, Joun litigated several civil rights cases in federal court, including Mack v. Suffolk County, which secured a $10 million settlement on behalf of a class of about 5,400 women detainees who were illegally strip-searched.
Reflecting the high regard to which he is held in the Boston community, Joun administered the oath of office to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu in November 2021.
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Photograph courtesy of Judge Myong J. Joun
winter 2023
