A young Ronald Lew is seen with parents
and siblings.

His father later opened a commercial laundry a few blocks from the old produce market, at Ninth and San Pedro. Later still, the family bought a home, back on Santa Barbara Avenue, near Hill Street.

"My backyard was the Coliseum and I played in Exposition Park," Lew recalls.

He remembers parking cars on the front lawn for a dollar, as many Coliseum neighbors still do (the going rate is now $5 or $10) and then taking the dollar to the Coliseum to watch the Trojans play.

He describes a skyline that consisted of only City Hall.

"Learning to drive in town was really great," Lew remembers, "because you never had to know directions. All you had to do was look up to figure out where you are. You know true north by looking up, and you could see the City Hall. The City Hall was the one building that stood out over everything. Now, you don't even barely see it."

He attended West Vernon Elementary School, then John Adams Junior High on Broadway and 28th. Then his father made a decision that Lew says affected the entire course of his life. He took all of his kids out of public schools and put them into parochial schools. Lew went to Loyola High—which turned out to be the alma mater for an amazing number of judges in the Los Angeles area.

"That's not to say that there's anything bad about the public school system," Lew offers. "But he wanted to give each of us a better education to have a chance in life. And I will be grateful to say Loyola High School was a very clear demarcation in my life in the sense that it took me to a different avenue, gave me the opportunities that I have received over the years. I think it prepared me to be what I am."

Ask Lew why his parents decided to switch all the kids to parochial schools at once and Lew responds with a long silence. When he speaks again it is a slower pace than before, in carefully measured words.

"I'll be quite frank," the judge says. "I've pondered that over the years. I don't know what caused them to just do that all of a sudden. I sort of think that it could have been this."

He tells a story doubtless repeated for many immigrant families.

Lew's mother spoke no English, but his father spoke a little, and he was active in the Chinese American community. At the time, the expatriate Chinese community in Los Angeles—as in most cities around the world—was a state apart, policed and governed not by the local authorities but by the Chinese themselves through organizations like the Six Companies and various family and village associations.

Similar organizations provided self-government for the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, but in no community was the separation as complete as with the Chinese, both because of racial prejudice on the part of Americans and because of a long history of self-sufficiency on the part of the newcomers.

But Lew says his father, and a few other like-minded leaders, saw that the era of the insular Chinatown could not last forever. They knew Chinese immigrants and their children had to become citizens, had to learn English and vote, had to rely on U.S. courts and police and civic leaders. The American-born Chinese, instead of becoming leaders of simply the benevolent associations or the Six Companies, also had to become lawyers and teachers and doctors.

The family was attending a local Catholic church, and one of the parishioners was the chair of the political science department at Loyola University. Lew supposes that his parents talked to him, and together the three adults perhaps plotted a strategy for Lew's life and career.

His oldest brother was at Caltech, so the sciences were covered. The other children would be pointed to different careers. Medicine, education, business.

Father's Decision

Lew's father decided that Ronald would go into law. Law would be the vehicle for integrating the Chinese community into the American system, and his son would be one of the people who would open the door between the two systems.

"I believe that through those conversations [with the Loyola professor] it was clearly pointed out that if I'm going to go to law school I need to go through the academic program," Lew says. "And he took me by the hand and said I had to go to Loyola University thereafter, be in his department, and go on to law. I believe that's part of the dream that my parents had."

So to prepare for Loyola University, Lew speculates, he was sent to Loyola High School. His brothers and sisters were likewise sent.

Did he resist having his career planned for him? Did he rebel?

"I could not have resisted it, because I did not know what it was to resist," Lew says. "I was an obedient child. I didn't know what else to do. I had no other vision, except to maybe become a doctor, perhaps. Or go into sciences like my brother. But no, my father says go into the area of law and it seemed like my whole life was paved that way, to go into law. Whether I succeeded or not, that's another matter. But certainly my direction was clear.

"I didn't rebel," he adds, "because I didn't know what to rebel from. I didn't know what it meant. To be real frank with you, I did not know what it meant."

There is another pause. Then a broad smile.

"In this day and age I don't advise parents to ever do what my parents did," he says.

On graduation, Lew enrolled in Southwestern Law School, "to see what I liked." He was half-planning to switch to Loyola Law School when the semester started, but he decided instead to stick with Southwestern. He went to classes, he studied and, with his brother in the military, he put in plenty of time at the family laundry.

It was the mid-1960s, and Lew's draft number came up. With the Vietnam war at its height, he believed a deferment was less than certain. So he went to the enlistment office. They offered him officer candidate school, and he was assigned to Oakland Army Base.

On leave one Christmas, he met a young lady he had heard about, but missed, at his older brother's wedding. She was his new sister-in-law's niece from Texas, and it soon became clear she was to become the future Mamie Lew.

First, though, came a tour of duty in Okinawa. He came back as a first lieutenant with a taste for travel. An Army career beckoned, and Lew could see himself serving in Europe for two years. But Mamie was at home. And so was something else.

"I chose to return to fulfill the dreams of my parents," Lew says. "Hopefully it was my dream too. Just to see where law would go."

Law Degree

So Lew completed his law degree and immediately found himself at somewhat of a loss. His family's plan for him was, more or less, complete. His parents knew little of what lawyers actually did, and law schools did not have placement offices at the time. What to do now? Lew went back to work at the laundry.

A few weeks went by, he recalls with a sheepish grin, until his father had had enough.

"He just said, 'You're fired,'" Lew remembers fondly, "'Go get a real job. You're a lawyer. You're fired.'"

Lew resisted. You're getting older, Dad, he remembers saying. You need someone to help you out. No, his father repeated, it's time. Go get a job.

Lew pulled out the Yellow Pages, thumbed through the "L" listings, for Law, and came upon the City Attorney's Office. The idea was to look up some classmates who didn't have the military detour that he did, and to see how they were doing. Maybe pick up some ideas about where to look for work.

So he called up Jacob Adajian, an old study group mate, and Adajian told him to come downtown for lunch.

"We stayed in touch," Adajian, now a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge, says. "I stayed in school, finished, went into the City Attorney's Office, and some friends and I recommended him."

They did it on the sly, Adajian says, and Lew confirms that he had no idea that when he came down to meet his old friends and chat with some of the lawyers at City Hall that he was being interviewed.

"I'm shaking hands, and I'm thinking gosh, I'm sure meeting a lot of powerful people," Lew says now. "And lo and behold, a week later they offered me a job. And obviously I accepted. That's how my career started."

At the City Attorney's Office, Lew learned to be a litigator, and presented the city's cases—both civil and criminal—before Municipal Court judges like Armand Arabian, Dickran Tevrizian, and Ronald George.

"All these people who are the who's-who in the judiciary," Lew declares. "These are people who I appeared before and got to work with. And who were my role models. So it was a wonderful time in my life. It was a real blessing to have gotten into the office."

But Lew came to recognize one more part of his father's dream for him. A small thing, maybe. But important. He wanted his son to have his own law office. A place to bring his friends, to show his son off.

"So he could bum around," Lew explains fondly, "come visit me, sit by my side, if he had people with problems he would bring them over, stuff like that. He wanted to be, you know, bonded in that way."

Lew was still in the City Attorney's Office when his father died of cancer, but he transferred from the criminal division to civil, in order to build the skills he would need to open his own practice. When he was ready, he said, he left, "to fulfill the final dreams."

Law Practice

George L. Avans is a dentist in the Coachella Valley. Once, though, he was a co-worker of Lew's in the City Attorney's Office, and he and Lew left together to open up a general law practice at Wilshire and Union. Later, they took space that was vacated by the State Bar of California.

"We had a general practice," Avans says. "Later on, we got rid of most of the criminal work. We had different styles. He had a different clientele. People in the Chinese community. A real hard-working guy."

The two men have stayed in touch after traveling separate career paths. Lew performed his former law partner's wedding ceremony a few years back, and the woman who answers the phone in the dental office knows Lew well from his visits.

"The judge?" she responds to someone inquiring about Lew. "He's a real sweetie!"

Avans calls Lew "a great guy" who always carried his end of the law practice even though, he insists, both of them believed they were making too little money for a couple guys who were working so hard.

Much of Lew's hard work went toward establishing community organizations. In the early 1970s, the era of the insular, self-governing Chinese community was coming to an end, and Lew, true to his parents' vision, played a key role in assuring as smooth a transition as possible into American life.

Before the 1970s, Lew says, a Chinese person was seldom seen in court. Or, for that matter, behind or in front of the desk at any governmental agency. But with the immigrant population burgeoning, and the American-born generation less and less likely to voluntarily hold itself apart from American culture, things had to change.

New Institutions

Lew helped organize the Chinatown Service Center, a non-profit organization set up to assist people to find jobs and housing. The Six Companies and the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Associations retained their presence, but the new institutions assured that Chinese immigrants would get their share of federal and state dollars and take their part in their new country. It took a lawyer—one with experience in the public sector, but with a healthy respect and understanding of the old ways—to pierce what Lew calls "the Chinese mentality" of keeping things in the community.

There were new problems to be addressed as well. New immigration brought a new criminal element, as gangs tried to cow merchants into paying protection money.

"They had to learn that the remedying of rights can be obtained through the court system," Lew says. "I was an integral part of that in those days, to help bridge the two systems. And get people to go within the system. And the long and short of it is that over the years, we effectuated that transition. And now there is full integration. I don't want to say my father was real smart and my mother, but certainly they recognized the need for having people as the tools for that kind of integration. And I suppose I am one of those."

In law, too, Lew was an organizer, helping to found the Southern California Chinese Lawyers Association and bring his colleagues together to offer each other advice and encouragement. They also went to work, encouraging college kids to give law a try—echoing the "encouragement" Lew got from his parents, and no doubt many of the other young lawyers got from theirs.

Things were changing elsewhere in the city as well, and Los Angeles' new mayor, Tom Bradley, told Lew he wanted more Asians in city government. Lew, Bradley told the young lawyer, would be perfect for the board overseeing the Fire and Police Pension system.

"Get a banker!" Lew says he told the mayor. It was, after all, a billion dollar fund. But Bradley wanted Lew, and he got him. The volunteer post gave Lew a new perspective on municipal government, and his place in it. For that, Lew says now, he owes the late mayor a lot.

Community Leader

Now a leader in the Chinese community and fast becoming a leader in the city's legal community, Lew had a pretty good idea who most of the Asian lawyers in town were. His parents, before they passed away, knew of Delbert Wong, appointed to the bench by Gov. Pat Brown as the nation's first Asian judge.

But Lew says he never really considered the bench.

"Judgeship was never something that was readily made available to us," Lew says. "I never thought of it like that. If one were to fantasize, perhaps one would fantasize floating around the clouds with a robe on. 'I'm a judge!' But no, that wasn't really something that was readily available to us."

But the Southern Chinese Lawyers Association began to focus on judicial appointments. It wasn't easy to get volunteers.

"We had to encourage," Lew says, using the same word he employs to describe the way his parents pointed him toward law.

"We had to really encourage, and basically force people to put their names in," Lew continues. He can rattle off the name of each one who agreed to put up his name (and later, her name), and each one who got an appointment.

"It was hard to get people, but a few good people stepped down and decided to do it for the sake of public interest, I included," he says. "I was convinced to apply for the judiciary."

The man who finally got him to apply was George S. Lee, a lawyer with a one-man office on Ninth and San Pedro, just about where Lew's father once had his laundry. This family friend would have lunch with Lew regularly, after Lew's father had passed away, and would "just pound on me" to become a judge. It's good for the community, he'd say, it's good for you. Lew resisted, until Lee found the secret formula.

"He says, 'Who's to say you're going to get it?'" Lew recalls. "Got my goat. And I said, you're right, I may not get it. So, okay, I'll put my name in for it."

Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Lew to the Los Angeles Municipal Court bench in 1982. It didn't matter that Brown was a Democrat and Lew a Republican. The judge takes pride in the fact that his appointments and nominations have come from both parties.

Lew looks back on his years in the Municipal Court as a wonderful time. He sat, for much of the time, in the San Fernando Valley, and had by then become a Valley resident. Mamie Lew describes their home as something out of the Donna Reed Show—a typical suburban family with the working Dad, the stay-at-home Mom, the four kids. She says her husband kept the house alive—still does, in fact—with his humor and his love of friendly chatter.

"I think about us as the little black-and-white family in 'Pleasantville,'" Mamie Lew says, referring to the recent film. "We still have the old-fashioned values."

In court, Lew says he loved dealing with the basics. Small claims, misdemeanors.

"Everything that you're involved with you're dealing right with the people," he says. "And it's a wonderful feeling to be able to do justice."

There were more sobering cases as well. Lew heard preliminary hearings for some particularly heinous crimes, including some well-publicized child abuse cases. But, again, he won't pick out which cases were the biggest, or the most important.

"I've been of the habit of never having to identify any one case in particular, because that would depreciate others," he explains once more.

Superior Court

In 1984, then-Gov. George Deukmejian appointed Lew to the Superior Court. He sat in the Criminal Courts Building for a while, but much of his work was, again, in the Valley. He also served two assignments on the Second District Court of Appeal.

He says he found the appellate work interesting. "But you certainly were always locked up in the back room," he recalls. "Researching and writing. It's totally different than trial court kind of work."

If Lew wanted to be elevated, he probably could have easily gotten his wish. But other frontiers called. Outside of Hawaii, no Chinese American had ever been appointed to the federal bench.

This was truly the big time. Presidential appointment, Senate confirmation, lifetime tenure. The most prestigious cases, the best trial lawyers. Lew wanted it.

"Just because," he explains. "Because it's not been done. And I want to see if it can be done. And lo and behold. I'm shocked. I made it."

It wasn't quite that easy. Lew tells of the year-and-a-half process from the time he indicated his interest to the time he took the bench. It's the politics, he explains. And if it looks bad now, Lew offers this assurance—it was bad for him, too. His hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee came two months before Judge Robert Bork's, and to hear Lew tell it, they were warming themselves up on Lew.

"Not fun at all," Lew says. The most telling part came after Lew's hearing was over, and he sat down to listen to the other hearings. While he was listening to the other nominees answer some fascinating questions, Lew recalls, a friend with a little more Potomac savvy crept up behind him and advised him to clear out, fast—unless he wanted to be recalled.

For the most part, Lew talks freely and without hesitation about his life and his work. Ask him about his cases, though, or politically hot topics that affect the bench, such as sentencing guidelines, and he is liable to offer a long silence.

Beware the Ron Lew pause.

It can appear anywhere, in the courtroom after an anxious attorney has moved to strike evidence or requested a recess; in casual conversation, after Lew is asked a question, or perhaps after he has made a statement of his own.

For the novice, the pause can intimidate. The judge is clearly weighing his thoughts and his words carefully. Whatever pronouncement is to come will be final. The silence may become awkward, and the moving attorney or the companion or whoever is undergoing the Ron Lew pause can be tempted to jump in, to fill the hole, to shatter the quiet.

Resist. Be patient. Lew's next words are liable to convey a gem of subtle, dry humor. Or maybe not. But when the judge speaks after one of his trademark pauses, there can be no doubt that he has thought the matter through.

"When he speaks it's usually to a very specific point," attorney Thomas Holliday says, referring to Lew's courtroom demeanor. "It will be very well thought out. He lets everyone have their say, he lets the lawyers do their job. Then he thinks, and he rules."

And that's it. Attorneys and their clients rarely feel they've been cheated out of their day in court when the courtroom is Lew's. Consider, for example, a favorite Lew story, from his Municipal Court days. A defendant, marched out of the courtroom in custody after having been sentenced to a year in jail, turned to the bailiff and complimented the judge for his ruling.

Lew's careful pause before making a statement or issuing a ruling likely represents due deliberation, because the judge rarely gives any hint of indecisiveness. It is no ploy to stall for time. Having made a decision, Lew appears unwilling to leave matters hanging.

"The cases move along in front of Judge Lew," Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Barry says. "He's decisive. I think he has a special knack for cutting through the arguments and deciding what evidence to admit. There's no back and forth. It moves."

The matters that seem to linger for any appreciable period in front of Lew are rare, but often famous. They help convey the story of how the judge works.

Barry prosecuted the 12-week Financial News Network case before Lew, bringing fraud charges against FNN Chairman Earl Brian. The length, Barry says, was due to the nature of the case, and not to Lew's style. In fact, he suggests, Lew helped keep the trial on track.

But the case was dwarfed, in both length and media scrutiny, by the so-called Mexican Mafia trial of 1997. More than six months in length, the trial resulted in the convictions and life sentences of members of La Eme, the notorious prison gang.

The judge moved the case along, observers said at the time, but he didn't rush it. Everyone had their say.

Attorneys call Lew's courtroom comfortable, but dignified. Barry says jurors like him, because he makes sure they are taken care of, and because they can see how fair he is to the parties before him.

Attorney Richard Kirschner, who chairs the local panel that provides representation to indigent criminal defendants, says that Lew stood out in the Mexican Mafia case, quietly, because of the respect he commanded in his courtroom.

"That was an extremely difficult case," Kirschner says, "but he won the respect of everyone, including the defendants."

Kirschner adds that lawyers who appear in Lew's courtroom know that their papers will be read, and not just by a clerk.

"I really believe that Ron reads everything," Kirschner says.

Holliday, president of the local chapter of the Federal Bar Association and a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, says Lew is one of those judges who makes the federal courthouse a user-friendly place.

"Decorum is maintained," Holliday says. "It's not that he's especially formal, but respectful of everyone in the courtroom. He's very quick to say, this is where the buck stops in terms of justice."

Chinese Museum

One of the best examples of Lew's knack for balancing easygoing humor and a desire to keep the process moving may come from outside the courtroom. It was 1995, and Lew, one of the prime movers behind getting a Chinese museum opened in the Plaza area near Olvera Street, where Chinatown used to be, was impatient with a city commission's slow pace in securing funding to get the building refurbished. The process had taken a decade, with no visible results.

"If you were to be in federal court for 10 years, I would say something is wrong," Lew said. "You'd be sanctioned, or thrown out of court."

Lew followed with one of his long pauses. The room at the El Pueblo Board of Commissioners meeting grew silent. Then Lew, with a straight face, added that he was not trying to intimidate the commissioners.

"Not much, your honor," Commission President Lydia Lopez said, and Lew laughed. So did everybody else.

As in his courtroom, everyone was put at ease. But the message was delivered. Keep the process on track.

"You have to be ready with Judge Lew," Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry says. "He runs a tight courtroom. He's a no-nonsense judge. But you come away knowing you had a fair hearing."