Yunica Jiang

Law School Lessons

Get to know your classmates and your professors—go to happy hours, go to office hours. Your classmates will become your friends, your colleagues, and your family. It is invaluable to have a strong network to understand what you are going through and support you when things get tough. My best memories of law school are the friendships I have made during the last three years. The professors at Temple Law are all incredibly welcoming and genuinely want every student to succeed. They are a source of wisdom not only for understanding material for classes but also for general life advice. I have received advice on everything ranging from how to prepare for a policy question on an exam to restaurant recommendations in Prague.

Study Abroad

During my 3L spring semester, I studied abroad in Tokyo through Temple Law’s Japan Program. It was an enriching and rewarding experience to learn about another country’s legal system while living there. I took classes in Japanese Law, International Civil Litigation, and International Tax. I also took Administrative Law with Professor Green in a mixed class of American J.D. students and Japanese LL.M students who were practicing attorneys. Outside of the classroom, we visited the Supreme Court of Japan and Fūchu Prison, the largest prison in Japan. We also observed a criminal trial involving an American citizen in the Tokyo District Court.

Temple Law Community

While at Temple Law, I was the President of the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA), a Staff Editor and later an Articles Editor for Temple Law Review, a Vice President of the International Law Society (ILS), and an Academic Core Enrichment (ACE) counselor. Each organization gave me new friendships and opportunities to collaborate as a team towards a bigger goal.

APALSA was my family within the larger Temple Law community. APALSA gave me so much during my 1L year, and I wanted to pay it forward to other Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) law students. The APALSA board chose a theme for the 2018–19 school year of “Cracking the Bamboo Ceiling” to confront the systemic barriers and challenges that AAPI attorneys face in attaining leadership roles. We held a career panel and networking reception in the fall and hosted a sold-out Lunar New Year banquet in the spring with a keynote speech by two esteemed AAPI attorneys to address this topic.

As a Staff Editor of Temple Law Review, I learned to appreciate the Bluebook and wrote a comment on classical music and copyrights that was published during my 3L year. As an Articles Editor, I worked with an incredible team of women to discuss, critique, and select prospective articles for publication.