Matsui Writing Competition

 

The Robert T. Matsui Annual Writing Competition was established by AEF in 2005 to honor the late Congressman Robert T. Matsui and his many accomplishments.  Through this Writing Competition, AEF seeks to encourage legal scholarship on issues of importance to the Asian Pacific American community.

A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the Hastings College of Law, Congressman Matsui was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1978 from Sacramento, California.  He won re-election to Congress thirteen times.  Congressman Matsui was a strong supporter of AEF, serving as the keynote speaker for the AEF’s Annual Benefit Dinner in 1997 and again in 2003.

AEF is now accepting submissions for the 2024-2025 Robert T. Matsui Writing Competition. If you would like to be considered, please submit (1) a completed Application Form; and (2) your written submission to applications@aefdc.org no later than Sunday, March 16, 2025. Please follow specific instructions in the Application Form. 

Submissions must be original works and not previously published, and be between 6,000 and 20,000 words. Submissions should address a legal topic of importance to the Asian-Pacific American community. Eligible candidates include all current law students (including LLM students) or those who have graduated from law school (including LLM students) in the past three years (i.e., 2024, 2023 and 2022). *The program is only open to students attending or graduating from law schools in the United States.

The winner will receive a $2,000 award and the winning entry will be published by the UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal (APALJ), subject to APALJ’s standard editorial process and copyright policy.  APALJ’s editorial process may require additional substantive edits prior to publication.

A number of prominent scholars, practitioners, and jurists nationwide have served on the Competition’s Board of Advisors, including Justice Ming W. Chin of the Supreme Court of California; Judge Ronald S.W. Lew of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California; Judge Florence Pan of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia; Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and co-founder of the AEF Robert T. Matsui Annual Writing Competition; Paul M. Igasaki, Chair and Chief Judge of the Administrative Review Board, Department of Labor; Debra Wong Yang, Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and former U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California; Viet D. Dinh, Partner, Kirkland & Ellis LLP and former U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy; Vincent A. Eng, founding partner of the VENG Group; Professor Jerry Kang of the UCLA School of Law; Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves of the the U.S. Court of International Trade and co-founder of the AEF Robert T. Matsui Annual Writing Competition; Sujit M. Raman, Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States and past president of AEF; and Michael P. Chu and John C. Yang, past presidents of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association.