Thomas Tang |
| Posted 2009-01-27 by Judy Wight Branson |
| The New York Times, New York City, New York Wednesday, July 21, 1995 Thomas Tang, a senior judge of the United States Court of Appeals, died on Tuesday at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, Ariz. A lifelong resident of Phoenix, he was 73. The cause was cancer, the Whitney & Murphy Arcadia Funeral Home in Phoenix, Ariz. reported. Judge Tang was named to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The court sits in San Francisco, and Judge Tang, whose office was in Phoenix, heard appeals from a sprawling jurisdiction covering nine states, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. A man known for his calm, gentlemanly demeanor, he championed individual rights and the advancement of minorities in the legal profession. In 18 years on the Ninth Circuit, he wrote some 400 opinions on American Indian law, labor practices, the rights of employees and other issues. He was particularly sensitive to individual rights of privacy and equal protection, including those of prisoners. One opinion went against a system by which people of Asian descent were hired for cannery jobs, had to eat in segregated mess halls and were denied higher-paying jobs like those held by whites. The Supreme Court's partial reversal of his finding caused bitter opposition in Congress. It was one of nine High Court decisions that made job-discrimination lawsuits harder to win. The rulings led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Congress's first successful effort to reverse the conservative Rehnquist Court's moves to restrict Federal anti-discrimination laws. Judge Tang, who took senior status less than two years ago, was born in Phoenix, where his father, Shing Tang, a Chinese immigrant, ran a wholesale grocery. He graduated from the University of Santa Clara in California in 1947 and received his law degree in 1950 from the University of Arizona College of Law. He clerked for Justice Evo DeConcini of the Arizona Supreme Court, whose son, Senator Dennis DeConcini, helped put him on the Federal bench. He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Dr. Pearl Mao Tang; a daughter, Carol Spicer of Phoenix, and a granddaughter. Also surviving are three brothers, the Rev. Emery Tang, of Huntington Beach, Calif.; Robert, of Captain Cook, Hawaii, and Eugene, of Prescott, Ariz.; and five sisters, Mary Ann Tang, of Phoenix, Margaret Tang, of Burlingame, Calif., Alice Tang, of Phoenix, Sister Patricia Tang, of Los Angeles, and Rosemarie Lee, of Fremont, Calif. |
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