The Hon. Janet S. Chung

Janet S. Chung serves on the Washington Court of Appeals, Division One. 

Prior to her appointment to the bench in 2022, she served as Advocacy Director of Columbia Legal Services (CLS), which engages in policy advocacy and impact litigation on behalf of people living in poverty. There, she helped guide and implement a strategic refocus of CLS’s work to better serve populations unable to access traditional legal aid services, including people who are incarcerated and people who lack U.S. legal status, particularly agricultural workers. During her tenure, CLS also launched an innovative community engagement program.

Prior to CLS, Judge Chung was Legal and Legislative Counsel at Legal Voice, a regional nonprofit legal advocacy organization in the Pacific Northwest that advocates for gender justice. There, Judge Chung focused on gender equity in employment, schools, and health care. She worked with local, state, and national coalitions to pass paid sick days and paid family and medical leave laws and was the primary drafter of Washington and Oregon's reproductive parity acts, as well as state pregnancy accommodations and equal pay laws. Her litigation helped secure reproductive freedom and stronger workplace protections, including for LGBTQ people and survivors of sexual assault.

Judge Chung has also served as a professor of legal writing and advocacy at Seattle University School of Law. She began her career as a law clerk to U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal (S.D. Tex.). She followed her clerkship with a Georgetown University Women’s Law and Public Policy fellowship in Washington, D.C. and has worked at law firms in D.C. and Seattle focusing on employment law and business and appellate litigation. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law.