About
Tsiwen Law is a first-generation Chinese-American attorney and professor who became a student striker in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strike of 1969 at UC Berkeley. After enrolling at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1968, he joined the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), which was the first organization in the U.S. to use the term Asian American. Unlike most AAPA members, Law grew up in New York and had spent many years in NY Chinatown where his father had operated a store. He discovered that other AAPA members had had similar experiences growing up in California Asian communities, and that most young Asian Americans used college as a way to leave their communities behind. Law was drawn to the idea of an Asian American Studies Program and a Third World College, as he felt it could offer valuable perspectives on the struggles he faced growing up in the U.S. and changing the attitude of Asian American students to challenge the decimation of Asian American communities by urban redevelopment programs. At that time, federal redevelopment programs were designed to dismantle Asian American communities to enable gentrification. In the winter of 1969, AAPA joined the Third World Liberation Front in demanding a Third World College at U.C. Berkeley. In the mornings, he would receive assignments from the TWLF speakers bureau to talk to classes at the invitation of the professors. At noon, he joined the picket line at Sather Gate to block the traffic toward the Student Union. In the course of participating in the picketing, he suffered the teargas grenades fired at strikers by the campus police and the Berkeley city police. Some twenty police departments sent their SWAT teams to intimidate the strikers, until they were replaced by the Alameda County Sheriffs, who appeared in full riot gear and 3 foot long night sticks. Law and the other strikers resisted the police attacks even though they were unarmed. In early March 1969, the Chancellor called upon the police to arrest the TWLF leadership as they were headed for the Chancellor’s Office for negotiations. Even with the leadership in jail, Law and the other strikers kept up their picketing until Governor Ronald Reagan called out the National Guard with bayonets on their rifles to surround the campus. Around that time, the faculty Senate voted overwhelmingly to support the TWLF demands. The administration agreed to an Ethnic Studies Department with four co-equal divisions. Classes began the following quarter. This experience honed Law’s critical organizing skills and taught him the role that institutional violence played in suppressing people of color, and later allowed him to develop classes for the Asian American Studies Program, which he would go on to teach.
Law graduated from UC Berkeley in 1978 and earned a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan in 1981. Law’s career has been diverse, including working as a factory worker, an automotive welder, truck mechanic, and industrial hygienist. In 1984 he graduated with a Juris Doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He used his organizing skills from the TWLF strike to organize and lead a strike of the automotive welders of Lodge 1305 (IAMAW) in 1977 and organize several bar associations. Law also founded the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association in Chicago in 1988, where he held a leadership role. He has also held leadership positions at the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Pennsylvania, the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA) of Greater Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Commission on Asian American Affairs. He received the NAPABA trailblazer award in 2001, the Philadelphia Bar Association Fidelity Award in 2008, and the A Leon Higginbotham Award from the Pennsylvania Bar Association in 2013. Law has taught Asian American Pacific Islander Studies for over fifteen years at universities such as the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Temple University. Today, he continues to practice law and teach Asian American legal history as an adjunct professor at the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law.