By Michael Fisch
law community
Judge Myong J. Joun, JD ’99, an immigrant from South Korea who overcame childhood homelessness to excel in law school, was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He is the first Asian American man to serve on the Bay State’s federal bench. President Biden nominated Joun this past winter, and the U.S. Senate confirmed him in July.
Joun served as an associate justice on the Boston Municipal Court (BMC) from 2014 to 2023. 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. “Judge Joun has the classic judicial temperament and approach—unflappable, extremely well-prepared, deliberate, and analytical,” Georges says.
A veteran of the U.S. Army and the Massachusetts National Guard, Joun is the third Suffolk Law graduate to be confirmed to a federal judgeship in recent years, joining U.S. District Judge for Rhode Island 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.
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winter 2024
Driving from Maine and Other Memories from the Suffolk Years
Joun attended the Law School’s evening program from 1995 to 1999, working during the day during his 1L year as a regional manager for a dollar store chain, and then later as a paralegal/office manager for a solo practitioner. His day job meant driving far and wide, overseeing stores from Maine to Connecticut. Getting to Suffolk Law on time for his 6 p.m. class was sometimes a challenge, he says, “but my professors were high caliber and very understanding. They recognized that the students had a lot of responsibilities to juggle.”
Suffolk Law Professor Emeritus Stephen Callahan had a big impact on the trajectory of his career, Joun says. Despite being an introvert and very shy at the time, Joun joined Callahan’s Chelsea-based landlord-tenant clinic.
“Professor Callahan taught me to be a human first and a lawyer second. That meant getting to know the clients, and understanding the issues they were facing beyond the immediate legal difficulty that brought them through the door. That knowledge often leads to better outcomes, including better-negotiated settlements,” he says.
What Suffolk Law does really well “is to instill in the students a sense of obligation that we all have in the profession to give back to the community, to make people’s lives a little easier,” Joun says. “And Suffolk does that job better than any other school. It’s an institution with many working people who gain the skills to help other working people.”
Photograph courtesy of Judge Myong J. Joun