By Nell Gluckman, From The Am Law Daily

Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, a racial discrimination suit filed by workers at an Alaska cannery, was decided more than 15 years ago. But in May it was argued again in a conference room at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York.

Some 150 lawyers came to watch a re-enactment produced by Cadwalader litigation partner Kathy Chin and her husband, Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. For nearly a decade the pair have been re-enacting important cases in Asian-American legal history for live audiences with help from members of the Asian American Bar Association of New York.

The Chins stage the re-enactments to educate other lawyers and to prompt discussions about race in the legal community. The May performance recreated a class action suit that was filed in 1974 by a group of cannery workers with immigrant backgrounds who claimed a company segregated them in poor housing and barred them from upper-level jobs. In 1988, the litigation made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which remanded the case for further proceedings before a district court sided with the employer and dismissed all claims in 1999.

“We recognized right away that this was a really great teaching tool,” says Denny Chin of the reenactments. Borrowing the concept from the American Inns of Court, a legal professional association, he and his wife have put together eight re-enactments since 2007. They introduce a new performance every November at the annual National Asian Pacific American Bar Association conference, and continue to perform it throughout the year at Cadwalader’s offices, regional bar association conferences and other venues.

Now the Chins plan to broaden the scope of their work. For a 2016 conference on the legacy of Constance Baker Motley, a civil rights lawyer who was the first black woman to become a federal judge, they will present a case that Motley argued. They are considering the case of James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first African American man admitted to the University of Mississippi after a nearly two-year legal battle. The conference is sponsored by Just The Beginning—A Pipeline Organization, a nonprofit that offers educational programs to underrepresented groups interested in pursuing careers in the law.

The Chins spend hundreds of hours writing the scripts for the re-enactments each year. Once they’ve selected a case to highlight, they pull together transcripts, newspaper articles, photographs and other information about the defendants, lawyers, judges and plaintiffs in a case. Their scripts include not only scenes from the courtroom, but also background information on the characters involved.

“What we’re looking for is, we want a trial transcript, we want a historic case, and we want one that has issues that are still relevant today,” says Denny Chin, who sentenced accused Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff to 150 years in prison in 2009.

For example, in 2008 they put together a script called “The Murder of Vincent Chin,” about a Chinese-American man killed by two men in the suburbs of Detroit in 1982. The men, who witnesses said uttered racial slurs as they beat Vincent Chin to death with a bat, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were given only three years’ probation.

“Was it race or was it just a bar fight?” asks Denny Chin. “Of course, we’re seeing that issue all the time now.”

To perform the re-enactments, the Chins enlist more than a dozen other members of the Asian American Bar Association of New York, including Andrew Hahn, a litigation and employment partner at Duane Morris, Baker & Hostetler corporate partner Ona Wang and federal district judge Lorna Schofield in New York. For the Motley case, they plan to work with members of Cadwalader’s Black and Latino Association. They rehearse at Cadwalader’s headquarters in New York, usually over pizza or wraps.

In their re-enactments, the Chins and their team don’t simply read the transcript. The couple serve as dual narrators, walking the audience through the historical context surrounding a case, often addressing other related cases, while the other actors enact scenes from court and relevant photos are projected on a screen.

The performances are not overly dramatic. Actors read from scripts in minimal costumes. But some lawyers do read their lines with emotion.

“All litigators are just closeted actors,” says Kathy Chin.

“For those of us who are in the courtroom, it’s fun to see how a good cross- examination was done in 1874. It’s not that different from how it’s done today,” adds her husband, referring to his re-enactment entitled “22 Lewd Chinese Women: Chy Lung v. Freeman,” the story of 22 Chinese immigrants who were detained in 1874 after a California immigration official decided they were prostitutes. The women won their case at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1876.

The re-enactments often spark heated discussions about race among the audience and performers.

A performance at the New-York Historical Society about the case of a group of Japanese-Americans who resisted the draft during World War II promoted one audience member, a history teacher, to question the use of the term “concentration camps” to describe the sites where Japanese-Americans were forcibly held during the war. The man felt the term should be reserved for use only in reference to the labor camps used in Europe during the Holocaust, Denny Chin recalls.

The judge says his group had had discussions about the term when crafting the script and originally opted for phrases like “internment camp” and “relocation center.” But in the end they chose “concentration camp” in order to be more direct and to avoid toning down the language.

“I was not offended that he was upset about this,” says Denny Chin, noting that “it’s an example of the interesting conversations” that arise from the performances.

That script was based in part from research by Eric Muller, a legal ethics professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, who wrote a book about the Japanese- American draft resisters, “Free to Die for Their Country.”

The performances are “a great way to bring legal history to life : to make it more relatable for people than a dry scholarly text or judicial opinion,” says Muller, who has participated in some of the re-enactments.

Cadwalader’s Kathy Chin says the script about the Japanese-American draft resisters, entitled “Heart Mountain: Conscience, Loyalty, and the Constitution,” forced her to contemplate some personal questions as well.

Though her Japanese immigrant grandparents had their bank accounts frozen by the government when World War II began, Kathy Chin believes that her father, a doctor who had served in the U.S. Army, would not have approved of glorifying anyone who resisted joining the military.

“They were very proud of their warriors,” she recalls. “That’s what my father talked about. I never heard of the draft resisters.”

But as Chin learned about the resisters, all 85 of whom were found guilty of draft evasion and sentenced to prison time in 1944 while their family members were held behind barbed wire, her interest grew.

“As you get into the story you think, my God, this takes a different kind of courage, but it’s courage nonetheless,” says Kathy Chin, adding that the emotional content of the cases can make it nerve-racking to perform some re-enactments.

This is especially true when people involved with the story are sitting in the audience, as was the case when they presented “Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio” at the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association’s annual convention last November.

“There were people in the audience crying,” recalls Kathy Chin. “They had been there. It was like, you know, I think we got it right.”

For more on this story go to: http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202731013836/Cadwalader-Partner-Federal-Judge-Broaden-Scope-of-ReEnactments#ixzz3eePf5Ynm