Fordham Law student Ben Lew ’23 has been selected as the winner of this year’s Robert T. Matsui Annual Writing Competition. Held by the Asian Pacific American Bar Association Educational Fund, the competition seeks to encourage legal scholarship on issues of importance to the Asian American community. This is the second year in a row that a Fordham Law student has won the top prize.
Lew’s award-winning paper examines the 1955 case Naim v. Naim, which dealt with the issue of interracial marriage. Han Say Naim, a Chinese immigrant, and his wife, Ruby, a white woman, had been married in North Carolina, where it was legal for Asian and white people to marry, but then moved to Virginia, where it was not. Ruby Naim sought an end to the marriage a year later, and a Virginia judge granted an annulment on the grounds that the marriage was invalid in the state.
An annulment—as opposed to a divorce, which would have acknowledged the validity of the marriage in the first place—would also end Han Say Naim’s chance at naturalization. He decided to appeal the decision, and the case made its way through the Virginia courts, and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied a ruling.
Like last year’s Fordham Law winner, Lew’s paper was originally written as a part of the Asian Americans and the Law class he took with Judge Denny Chin ’78 and Professor Thomas H. Lee.
“It feels great to have my writing recognized,” said Lew about his win. “This is a topic that is very important to me, because I come from a mixed race household; my dad is Korean American, and my mom is white. I found it really interesting that this case about interracial marriage could have gone up to the Supreme Court, but was never heard. I wanted to go a little bit deeper into some of the factual reasons of maybe why that was.”
Lew found that, unlike the landmark 1967 case Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court struck down state laws banning interracial marriages, the Naim case did not have some of the same “feel-good details,” and therefore was unlikely “to generate wide public sympathy.”
“Is it informative that the Naims were not ‘perfect plaintiffs,’ and thus is resolution of constitutional issues reserved for individuals who are closest to the Court’s conception of normal?” wrote Lew in his paper. “In determining that the Naims were unlikely to generate public support because of their circumstances, I conclude that this case is important in demonstrating how the political nature of the Court creates a preferential bias towards plaintiffs that align closest to monogamous, patriarchal, and white American values.”
The Matsui Writing Competition prize comes with an award of $5000 and publication in the UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal.