Rowan Wilson honored at 2024 Asian American Judges Association of New York dinner

Chief Judge of the state Court of Appeals Rowan Wilson received a warm welcome Tuesday night at the 2024 Asian American Judges Association annual dinner at House of Joy in Manhattan’s Chinatown. 

Facing a room packed with jurists, Wilson accepted the honors from association President Shahabuddeen Ally and gave praise to those in attendance for helping to “create an inclusive system which values everyone for who they are. It doesn’t try to fit people into a mold.”  

The event, coinciding with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month, drew hundreds of judges from the entire state. An event journal distributed at the dinner titled, “You don’t look like a judge:" The evolving composition of the New York State Judiciary from the AAPI Perspective,” also offered a rare glimpse into the lives of Asian American judges from around the state. 

“The comment ‘You don’t look like a judge,’ in all its various forms, is familiar and recurring to many of us. Of course it’s not an expression exclusively applied to Asian Americans. Surely many of our judicial colleagues of color, our female and /or younger counterparts, and others in under represented groups of our judicial colleagues of color, our female and our younger counterparts, have almost certainly heard this before, wrote state Court of Claims Judge Zainab Chaudhry, who is Pakistani, and Monroe County Court Judge Meredith Vacca, who is South Korean born and Italian American, in the booklet’s forward. “We hope that this publication helps debunk, in whatever small way it can, the stereotype of what judges should look like, how they should act, or where they come from.”