President Biden appointed Judge Lucy Koh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in December 2021. President Obama appointed Judge Koh to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in June 2010. Governor Schwarzenegger appointed her to the California Superior Court for the County of Santa Clara in January 2008. She was formerly a partner at McDermott Will & Emery in Silicon Valley; an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles; and in Washington, D.C., a Special Assistant to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick and a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow on U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy’s Senate Judiciary Committee staff. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard.

Judge Koh is the first Korean American female federal appellate judge in the United States, the first Korean American federal district judge in the United States, the first Asian American district judge in the Northern District of California, the first Korean American female judge in the Bay Area, and the first Korean American judge in Santa Clara County.