BEFORE the much celebrated Tani Cantil-Sakauye was appointed to the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court last year, there was another Filipino-American judge who helped set her path and all other future Filipino judges in the US.
In 1981, then former Governor Jerry Brown (who was recently elected Governor of California again) appointed Mel “Red” Recana to serve in the California Judiciary, becoming the first Filipino-American to hold this position. Recana had served as the deputy district attorney for the County of Los Angeles before brown appoints.
Since that appointment, Recana has served two terms as the Presiding Judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court; elected by the 190 municipal court judges in Los Angeles County as Chair of the Municipal Court Judges Association in 1999 and also elected for a three-year term to the Executive Board of the California Judges Association (CJA). He was later elevated to the Superior Court by unification of the Superior and the Municipal Courts.
Born in the Philippines, Recana graduated from the University of the East in Manila before moving to California.
According to several Filipinos for Jerry Brown website, Recana became the first Philippine-educated and trained lawyer to pass the California Bar Examinations without going back to an American law school in 1974. Three years later, he became the first Filipino Deputy District Attorney in the County of Los Angeles.
In 1993, Recana received a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. At Harvard, he drafted and successfully sought the passage of the Judges Sabbatical Leave Law, Government Code Section 68554, which is the first statute of its kind in the country. He also graduated class valedictorian at the National Center for State Courts in Washington D.C., where he was conferred the title, Institute for Court Management Graduate Fellow.
Recana is also a writer, authoring How to Try Your Own Case in Court-And Win!, which was published in 1997.
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