Qualifications
Experience
|
Biography
REFEREE CYNTHIA LOO was appointed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court on March 7, 2000.
In January 2005 she received the "Outstanding Judicial Officer" award from the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court's Bar Association.
On April 26, 2008, the Los Angeles Times noted "she earns high marks from attorneys on all sides for her handling of juvenile cases...Loo is an asset to juvenile court, an assignment that ought to be highly sought but seldom is."
Referee Loo is a 1990 graduate of the University of Southern California School of Law. While in law school, Cynthia was a legal intern at AYUDA, a non-profit agency assisting low-income individuals in immigration, domestic violence, and landlord tenant matters. She was an extern and research attorney for U.S. District Court Judge Edward Rafeedie, as well as a law clerk at the ACLU and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Referee Loo worked for approximately ten years representing abused and neglected children in juvenile dependency matters for the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles. Prior to her current judicial duties, she also volunteered with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles's Unlawful Detainer Equal Access Project, and the Los Angeles County Bar Association (LACBA) Barristers Domestic Violence Project.
She is on the governing boards of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Minorities in the Judiciary, the Asian Pacific American Bar Association (APABA), the Asian Pacific American Women's Lawyers Alliance (APAWLA) and the State Bar's Council on Access & Fairness. She is the Chair for the Multicultural Bar Alliance's (MCBA*) Diversity on the Bench Program, and the Co-Chair of the Women Lawyer Association of Los Angeles' (WLALA) Westside Mentoring Circle.
Previously she was on the governing boards of the California Asian-Pacific American Judges Association, WLALA, the State Bar's former Access and Fairness Committee 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 a volunteer law professor of criminal procedure at the People's College of Law (PCL) for the past five years. 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.
Referee Loo has been requested to submit articles to publications such as Gavel to Gavel, the Los Angeles County Superior Court's judicial magazine; The Bench, the official magazine of the California Judge's Association; Los Angeles Lawyer, the magazine of the LACBA and Valley Lawyer, the magazine of the San Fernando Valley Bar Association. She has been asked by various groups to speak regarding gang violence, California's "Three Strikes" Law, juvenile justice, domestic violence, diversity on the bench and in the legal profession.
Referee Loo was assigned to the Compton courthouse from 2002 to 2005 where she heard both juvenile delinquency and family law matters. A judicial profile that appeared about her in the Daily Journal on April 13, 2006, noted, "[H]er sensitivity to the community's needs slowly won people over, lawyers said. 'They embraced her for her compassion and judicial nature ... She wasn't just a person who comes out of the back room and disappears and is not responsive to the community.'"
For the past five years she has presided over juvenile delinquency cases in the Eastlake Juvenile Courthouse in East Los Angeles. In an article in which she was profiled in LA Youth, it concluded, "One day in one court isn't enough for me to understand the whole court system, but by the time we left, I had learned a lot about the mercy a judge can have. Judge Loo wasn't only fair; she was respectful, and she wanted to help teenagers live meaningful lives."
*The members of the MCBA include: Arab American Lawyers Association, APABA, APAWLA, Black Women Lawyers, Iranian American Lawyers Association, Italian American Lawyers Association, JABA, John Langston Bar Association, Korean American Bar Association, Latina Lawyers Bar Association, Lesbian & Gay Lawyers Association, Mexican American Bar Association, Philippine American Bar Association, San Fernando Valley Bar Association, South Asian Bar Association, SCCLA, WLALA and the Ventura County Asian American Bar Association.
