Lucy Koh

Born on August 7, 1968,[2] in Washington, D.C., Koh was the first member of her family to be born in the United States. Her mother, a refugee from North Korea, had escaped the country at the age of ten after walking two weeks to South Korea. Her father was a veteran of the Korean War, where he fought communist forces.[3]

Koh spent most of her childhood in Mississippi, where her mother was an academic at Alcorn State University. She also spent parts of her young life in Maryland and Oklahoma. In 1986, Koh graduated from Norman High School in 1986 in Norman, Oklahoma. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College in social studies in 1990 and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1993.[4][5][6][7]

From 1993 until 1994, Koh worked for the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary as a Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow. From 1994 until 1997, Koh worked for the United States Department of Justice, first as a Special Counsel in the Office of Legislative Affairs (1994–1996) and then as a Special Assistant to the United States Deputy Attorney General (1996–1997).[8] From 1997 until 2000, Koh served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Office of the United States Attorney for the Central District of California.

From 2000 until 2002, she worked as a Senior Associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a Palo Alto, California law firm. From 2002 until 2008, Koh worked as a litigation partner at the Silicon Valley office of the law firm McDermott Will & Emery representing technology companies in patent, trade secret and commercial civil matters.[9]

In January 2008, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Koh a judge on the Santa Clara County Superior Court, a position she held until becoming a U.S. District Judge in 2010.[8][7]

Koh has presided over litigation including Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, FTC v. Qualcomm (finding antitrust liability for conduct in licensing standard-essential patents, later reversed), and multi-district litigation, including the Yahoo and Anthem data breaches and Apple and Google privacy litigation.[24]

In 2020, Koh presided over a case in which a coalition of local governments, activist groups, and American Indian tribes sued the commerce department over early completion of the 2020 census. She issued a ruling that ultimately resulted in extending the once-a-decade count from September 30 to October 15.[25][26]

In Tandon v. Newsom, Koh ruled that California could ban small religious gatherings in homes as a COVID-19 mitigation tactic. The Ninth Circuit affirmed Koh, but the Ninth Circuit's ruling was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, who ruled that California's restriction on religious gatherings in private homes was unconstitutional.[27] The Supreme Court indicated that it was the "fifth time the Court has summarily rejected the Ninth Circuit's analysis of California's COVID restrictions on religious exercise."[28][29]

Koh is married to Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former California Supreme Court Justice and Stanford University law professor.[30] They have two children.[31]

• List of Asian American jurists
• List of first women lawyers and judges in California
• List of first women lawyers and judges in the United States
• Hillary Clinton Supreme Court candidates
• Joe Biden judicial appointment controversies
• Joe Biden Supreme Court candidates

• Lucy Koh at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.
• Lucy H. Koh at Ballotpedia