Candidate for
Judge, Superior Court; County of Los Angeles; Office 82

CYNTHIA LOO has been a judicial officer with the Los Angeles County Superior Court for eight years. Since she was sworn in as a Superior Court Referee on March 7, 2000, Referee Loo has had the same responsibilities as a Superior Court judge.

She is the recipient of the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court Bar Association's 2004 Juvenile Court Judge of the Year award "as a result of the vote of [JCBA's] members in recognition of distinguished professional contribution to the practice of California Juvenile law . . ."

While in law school, she was an extern for U.S. District Court Judge Edward Rafeedie, and a legal intern at AYUDA, a non-profit agency assisting low-income individuals in immigration, domestic violence, and landlord tenant matters.

Following her graduation from the University of Southern California School of Law in 1990, Ms. Loo was a law clerk for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After passing the bar, Ms. Loo worked for several years representing abused and neglected children in juvenile dependency matters for the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles.

She has been appointed by the First, Second and Fourth District Court of Appeals to represent indigent individuals in civil appeals. Prior to her full-time appointment to the bench, Referee Loo also was a research attorney in civil and criminal matters for U.S. District Court Judge Edward Rafeedie.

She is currently teaching her fifth semester of criminal procedure at the People's College of Law (PCL). PCL is a non-profit law school that trains socially conscious community lawyers and was opened in part to give those historically denied access to legal training, such as working people, women, and people of color, an opportunity to go to law school. Tuition is affordable because PCL's professors donate their salaries back to the law school and are essentially unpaid volunteers.

Referee Loo has been a speaker on behalf of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Minorities in the Judiciary, the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the Women Lawyer's Association of Los Angeles (WLALA), the Los Angeles County Bar Association (2007 Diversity Summit and its Youth Peer Mediation & Conflict Resolution - Dispute Resolution Services), the Asian Pacific Women's Center, the Los Angeles County Probation Department, the Southern California Chinese Lawyer's Association (SCCLA), the California Bar's Committee on Women in the Law and the Los Angeles Chinese-American Sheriff Advisory Committee.

She has been invited to speak regarding topics such as gang violence, the "Three Strikes" law, domestic violence, women in the law, teaching law, diversity in the legal profession and on the bench, and juvenile justice.

She has been requested to submit articles to GAVEL TO GAVEL, the Los Angeles County Superior Court's Judicial Magazine; THE BENCH, the official magazine of the California Judge's Association and LA LAWYER, the publication of the LA County Bar. Her articles have also been published in THE CRIMINAL DOCKET, the publication of the Criminal Justice Section of the LA County Bar; CALIFORNIA COURT'S REVIEW; WHITTIER JOURNAL OF CHILD AND FAMILY ADVOCACY; DAILY JOURNAL; ASIANWEEK; WLALA NEWSLETTER and the ABA's JD RECORD.

For the past two years she has been on the executive board of the California Asian-Pacific American Judges Association, and is a member of the California Judges Association. She is active in the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles (WLALA), where she is co-chair of the Criminal Justice Section as well as WLALA's Westside Mentoring Circle; SCCLA; Los Angeles County Bar's Diversity in the Profession Section; and the Multicultural Bar Alliance of Southern California (MCBA).* She is also on the governing board of both the Asian Pacific American Bar Association (APABA) and the Asian Pacific American Women's Law Alliance (APAWLA). She was formerly on the State Bar's Access and Fairness Standing Committee on Women in the Law and the well regarded Court's Working Group of the State Bar's Diversity Pipeline Task Force.

Referee Loo has been involved in many programs to promote diversity in the legal profession and on the bench through the American Bar Association' Standing Committee on Diversity in the Legal Profession, California Bar's Pipeline Diversity Task Force, the California Bar's Access and Fairness Committee of Women in the Law, Los Angeles County Bar Association's Diversity Summit, Japanese American Bar Association (JABA), WLALA, and the MCBA.

She has been a volunteer with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles's Unlawful Detainer Equal Access Project, the Los Angeles County Bar Barristers Domestic Violence Project and a volunteer judge for the Barristers Moot Court Competition, Asian Pacific Women's Center, the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court's Adoption Day and the Constitutional Rights Foundation.

Since her appointment to the bench in 2000, She has sat in both the Juvenile and Family Law courts. From November 2002 to January 2005 she heard juvenile criminal matters in the Compton Courthouse. Since 2005, she has been assigned to the Eastlake Juvenile Courthouse where she continues to hear juvenile criminal, delinquency matters.