By Takei Okidata
©2002 PoliticalCircus.com
May 3, 2002

Margaret Fung is Executive Director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a New York-based organization founded in 1974 to protect and promote the civil rights of Asian Americans through litigation, advocacy and community education. She graduated from Barnard College and received her law degree from New York University Law School, where she was a member of the NYU Law Review, an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow and a Root-Tilden Scholar. Fung received an honorary LL.D. from City University of New York (CUNY) Law School in 1997.

In April 1992, she was invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the Voting Rights Language Assistance Act, which requires the provision of bilingual ballots and assistance to over 200,000 Asian American voters nationwide. Her advocacy efforts led to the first fully translated Chinese-language ballots in New York City for the 1994 elections. She was also co-counsel for defendant-intervenors in the 1996 redistricting case, Diaz v. Silver, in which a federal court found that Asian Americans constitute a "community of interest" within New York's 12th Congressional District. She also organized AALDEF's first exit poll of Asian American voters in New York City in 1988. These multilingual voter surveys have been conducted in every major election since then, with over 5,000 Asian American voters polled in the 2000 presidential election.

Fung won a landmark ruling from the New York Court of Appeals in 1986, which required for the first time that the impacts of new development on low-income tenants and small businesses be considered under state environmental laws. This case, Chinese Staff and Workers Association v. City of New York, blocked the construction of a proposed 21-story condominium in Manhattan's Chinatown and has been used as a legal precedent by other groups challenging the effects of secondary displacement in their neighborhoods.

Fung serves on the boards of directors of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, the National Association of Public Interest Law, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, and the New York Civil Liberties Union. She was appointed by Governor Mario Cuomo to serve on the New York State Temporary Commission on Constitutional Revision and by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to serve on the Mayor's Task Force on Police/Community Relations, which was formed after the police torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. She also serves on Community Board #1 in Lower Manhattan, which plays an advisory role in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site after September 11.