Nationality American Role Lawyer Alma mater Harvard Law School Employer Irell & Manella | Occupation Patent lawyer Siblings Steven Chu, Gilbert Chu Name Morgan Chu | |
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Born December 27, 1950 (age 73) ( 1950-12-27 ) Education Yale University, Harvard Law School, University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard University | ||
Nephews Geoffrey Chu, Michael Chu | ||
Morgan Chu Comments during Public Counsel's William O. Dougl
Morgan Chu (born December 27, 1950), an intellectual property attorney, is one of the first Asian Americans to lead a major U.S. law firm. Chu's professional accolades recognize him as one of the nation’s most influential lawyers and most successful trial attorneys.
Contents
- Morgan Chu Comments during Public Counsels William O Dougl
- Biography
- Education
- Legal career
- Public service
- Awards And honors
- References
A high-school dropout, Chu went on to earn advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale and UCLA. In 2007, UCLA awarded Chu the UCLA Medal, the university’s highest accolade for exceptional achievement, citing Chu’s "groundbreaking approach to intellectual property" and honoring him as a founder of the Asian American Studies Center.
Chu was named The Outstanding Intellectual Property Lawyer in the United States in the first Chambers Award for Excellence, 2006. Chambers has described Chu as "beyond doubt the most gifted trial lawyer in the USA."
Chu served as the co-managing partner of the firm Irell & Manella LLP from 1997–2003, and has been a member of its governing board, the Executive Committee, since 1985. In June 2009, Harvard alumni elected Chu to a six-year term as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.
Biography
Chu’s Chinese name (Traditional Chinese: 朱欽文; Simplified Chinese: 朱钦文; Pinyin: Zhū Qīn-Wén) means to be respectful of education and culture and his family is one of scholars. His father, Ju-Chin Chu, left China in 1943 to study chemical engineering, earning a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he later taught at Washington University in St. Louis and at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Chu's mother Ching Chen Li, also left China during World War II to study economics at MIT. His parents married in 1945 and began a family. Chu is the youngest of three brothers. His oldest brother, Gilbert Chu, holds an M.D. and a Ph.D, and is a professor of biochemistry and medicine at Stanford University. The middle brother, Steven Chu, was a professor of physics at Stanford and later a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at University of California, Berkeley, and the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Steven Chu was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 and was President Obama's Secretary of Energy from January 21, 2009 to April 22, 2013.
Education
Chu dropped out of high school and left home, but by age 25, he had five university degrees. Although he never received a high school diploma, he gained admittance to UCLA, where he earned a B.A. (1971), M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1973). Chu then received a Master of Studies in Law from Yale Law School (1974) and a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School (1976)
In high school, Chu once got every question wrong on a 100 question True-False test
Legal career
Following his law school graduation, Chu served as a law clerk for Hon. Charles M. Merrill, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1976–1977). In 1977, Chu went to work as an associate at the Los Angeles law firm of Irell & Manella. Chu was elevated to partner in 1982, and became the firm’s co-managing partner in 1997, serving two terms until 2003. Chu is known for his many high-profile trials involving technology including:
Public service
When Chu was still an undergraduate at UCLA, he co-founded UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center. He has previously served on the Board of Governors of the University of California, Los Angeles Foundation. Mr. Chu also has been an Adjunct Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and has served as a judge pro tem.
At Harvard Law School, Chu was an editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, a leading legal journal founded to promote personal freedoms and human dignities.
Since law school, Chu has been a frequent lecturer and teacher. He participated in symposia at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and he was the Traphagen Distinguished Speaker at Harvard in 2003. Chu served as an adjunct professor at UCLA Law School from 1978 to 1981. He has lectured or delivered papers at Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Georgetown, Northwestern, California Institute of Technology, UCLA, University of Southern California, among other venues.
Chu was Founding Chair of U.S.C. Law School’s Intellectual Property Law Institute (2004–06), and has served on its Executive Committee since 2004.
Chu serves on the Board and Executive Committee of Public Counsel, the largest pro bono public interest law firm in the world. In one of his pro bono cases, Chu spent six years securing the reversal of a conviction of a death row inmate, the first reversal upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court of a conviction and death penalty in the 20 years since California had reinstated the death penalty.
Chu and his wife Helen have endowed student scholarships at Harvard and UCLA, as well as the Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences (IMGSBS) at City of Hope. Today, the IMGSBS is among a handful of graduate schools that recruit foreign Chinese national scholars as postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, technical staff, and faculty. Many of the NIH- and/or CIRM-funded research groups at IMGSBS are staffed entirely by Chinese nationals.
Awards And honors
Chu has received numerous awards and honors as one of the top attorneys in the United States, as well as for his contributions to higher education and the community. They include: