ANDREW LEONG is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, focusing on law, justice, and equality issues pertaining to disenfranchised communities. He was supervising attorney of the Asian Outreach Unit at Greater Boston Legal Services from 1986 to 1990, and former director of the Chinatown Clinical Program at Boston College Law School. He has served as a trustee of numerous Asian American and civil rights-related organizations, including the Asian American Resource Workshop, the Asian Community Development Corporation, and the Chinatown Quincy School.

He has taught at UMB since 1990 primarily in legal studies, Asian American and Latino Studies. His substantive areas of practice and teaching include anti-Asian violence, hate crimes, immigration reform, Asian American legal history, environmental justice, anti-gentrification strategies, and community lawyering.

Professor Leong also served as the President of the Asian American Lawyers Association of Massachusetts from 1989 to 1994. During the same period, he was also President of the Harry H. Dow Memorial Legal Assistance Fund. He has fought numerous episodes of environmental injustice in Boston's Chinatown neighborhood and previously chaired "The Campaign to Protect Chinatown." He co-authored a national report highlighting gentrification in three cities: https://www.aaldef.org/uploads/pdf/Chinatown%20Then%20and%20Now%20AALDEF.pdf and is advisor and appears in the 2021 documentary, “A Tale of Three Chinatowns” https://threechinatowns.com.

Over the course of his career, Professor Leong has also provided pro bono legal representation and technical assistance to victims of anti-Asian violence, including the assistance of hate crime prosecution in anti-Asian violence cases with the Attorney General of MA and county prosecutions by district attorneys. His publications here include the topics of “Anti-Asian Violence” and “Chinese Exclusion Act” in Sana Loue and Martha Sajatovic (eds.), Encyclopedia of Immigrant Health (Springer). He also assisted the victims in the police brutality case of the “Quincy 4”, see “Zenobia Lai, and Andrew Leong, From a Community Lawyers' Lens: The Case of the 'Quincy 4' and Challenges to Securing Civil Rights for Asian Americans” (https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1121571 ).

In 2009, he was the legal counsel for thirteen Korean American student victims of an anti-Asian bias hate incident at Tufts University ("KSA 13"). Where initially the white perpetrator lied to the press about how he was assaulted by the Korean-Am students, the KSA members rallied, organized, and worked to secure their legal rights and the truth that they were the victims. In a rare instance for hate incidents, the KSA13 met with their perpetrator and eventually successfully negotiated an agreement where the perpetrator admitted publicly to his racist actions.

Prof. Leong also provided legal counsel and training on a case where more than thirty Asian students were systematically beaten on one day in South Philadelphia High School (see http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/15/philadelphia-school-district-agrees-to-measures-to-quell-anti-asian-violence/ ). The work with the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund resulted in the US Department of Justice substantiating the complaint against the Philadelphia School District in discriminating against Asian American students by the summer of 2010 (See Cecilia Chen and Andrew Leong, “We Have the Power to Make Change: The Role of Community Lawyering in Challenging Anti-Asian Harassment at South Philadelphia High School,” Asian American Law Journal, 26 pages, University of California-Berkeley, Spring 2013.)

During the academic year of 2015-16, Prof. Leong provided pro bono legal services in the case of Larry Chen (an elementary school teacher that was being terminated in Brookline for the use of the phrase "bullshit" in a private conversation in a classroom after school hours). Through the massive community organizing by his students and parents, Mr. Chen was reinstated.

In December of 2015, Prof. Leong provided counsel, legal information to and initiated the community organizing and struggle of two African American police officers in Brookline who were victims of racial harassment by fellow and superior white officers within the BPD. One Black officer was greeted by a superior with “Why don’t you going over there and give me some ‘n----r” jumping jacks.” The officers were later represented by Lawyers for Civil Rights and resulted in a settlement.

Lastly, Prof. Leong is most proud of being one of two lead plaintiffs in a proposed class-action lawsuit back in 2007 against cereal giant Kellogg and Viacom under MGL c. 93A, working as a client with the Center for Science in the Public Interest to comment on the law work related to the case. The landmark implications of the pre-lawsuit settlement took a giant initial step against the obesity epidemic. See http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB113763884339250539 and
http://www.cspinet.org/new/200706141.html and http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/viacom___kellogg.pdf

Professor Leong has written about welfare and immigration reform, hate crimes, environmental justice, and community lawyering and serves as a pro bono consultant to many Chinatowns across North America in addressing gentrification. Since 2017, he is frequently in the community conducting "Know Your Rights" presentations to immigrant communities across Greater Boston. He is an occasional panelist on WGBH PBS TV's “Basic Black”.