New York Times’ Profile on Silicon Valley Judge Lucy Koh

If you’re in the smartphone industry, you know that Samsung and Apple have been suing each other over patent infringement for the past few years, and the case happens to be overseen by Silicon Valley based judge and coincidentally, Korean American Lucy Koh. The New York Times does a nice brief profile in a blog posting on her:

“Appointed to the federal court in 2010, Judge Koh, 45, is the first Asian-American district judge in the Northern District of California. She lives in Silicon Valley with her husband, a Stanford law professor, and their two children. Judge Koh was born in the United States after her family immigrated from South Korea, and grew up in Mississippi. Her father, who died soon after the first Apple and Samsung patent trial, owned a sandwich shop, where the judge worked while she was a student. Her mother, a college professor, fled North Korea for Seoul when she was young. The judge attended Harvard for her undergraduate studies and law school, and then worked in Washington for the Senate Judiciary Committee and later for the Justice Department. In 1997, she moved to California to become a federal criminal prosecutor for the United States Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Three years later, she moved to Silicon Valley to be closer to her grandparents, and joined the law firm McDermott Will & Emery, working as a patent litigator for tech companies. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger nominated her to be a judge for the Superior Court of California for Santa Clara County, where she served from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, President Obama nominated her to the federal bench.””

It’s a small Silicon Valley and even smaller Korean American community in the Bay Area, so I wouldn’t be surprised that someone I know knows her. As for Apple vs. Samsung, maybe there is or not validity in Apple’s claims against Samsung. But personally, I have always found it interesting that Apple claims that Microsoft ripped off Apple with its Windows, when Steve Jobs and Apple clearly got their ideas and implementation of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the Macintosh based on XEROX’s work. And if you think about it, a lot of the User Interface (UI) elements of iOS and the iPhone are based on the work of Palm and their OS.