The Honourable Justice Randall Wong is a pioneer in Canadian law. He served as the first Chinese Canadian provincial Crown Counsel (1967) and became a BC Provincial Court judge in 1974. In 1981 he became the first Chinese Canadian federally appointed judge with his appointment to the British Columbia County Court. In 1990 he was promoted to a position on Canada's Supreme Court serving the Supreme Courts of British Columbia, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut's Court of Justice.
In 2006 Justice Wong gave an address in Vancouver to the Association of Chinese Canadian Professionals, and reflected on the early years of Chinese Canadians practicing law:
"Even in the 1960s, not many Chinese-Canadians studied law as a career. UBC Law School only graduated one or two Chinese-Canadians out of a class of sixty students per year. Andrew Joe was the First Chinese-Canadian who graduated from UBC Law ... and was the first to be admitted to The Law Society of B.C. Most Chinese-Canadian lawyers practised in Chinatown and were primarily solicitors and not litigators. None were employed with major law firms in Vancouver until the late 1970s."
For more, listen to the Allard Law History Project interview with Buddy Wong.