Biography

Miyoko T. Pettit-Toledo ‘15 is a proud graduate of the William S. Richardson School of Law, where she joined the faculty in August 2022 as an Assistant Professor of Law.  She currently teaches Civil Procedure I & II, Advanced Civil Procedure, and Second Year Seminar.  Since its inception in 2020, she has also helped to organize and lead the annual non-credit Business Boot Camp course for Richardson law students.

Professor Pettit-Toledo’s scholarship merges legal theory, research, and analysis with frontline advocacy for civil and human rights as well as social justice—something she learned and took to heart as the inaugural Korematsu Scholar Advocate while in law school.  Her work explores reconciliation initiatives and reparations for historic injustice with an emphasis on the intersection of race and gender.  Her recent cutting-edge research on healing persisting historic injustice harms across generations draws upon multiple disciplines including law, social psychology, human rights and indigenous conflict resolution, public health, and more.  This scholarship, in part, engages with victims, survivors, advocates, scholars, journalists, healers, government officials, community members, and those seeking to repair the harms from the Jeju, South Korea “peacetime” April 3^rd Tragedy, as part of the ongoing reconciliation initiative that she first started working on over a decade ago.  Another area of her scholarship focuses on developments in the rules of civil procedure—at the federal and state level—and how amended rules may promote or hinder access to justice (in concept and in practice).  Her ongoing research focuses on the processes—including consequences and shortcomings—of making civil procedure in the U.S. Territories.  Her scholarship has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Denver Law Review, Berkeley Journal for Gender, Law, and Justice, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, University of Hawai‘i Law Review, and Asia Pacific Law and Policy Journal, in addition to other publications in South Korea such as the World Environment and Island Studies Journal.  She is also the co-author of a book The Jeju 4.3 Tragedy: Next Steps Toward Reconciliation (translated in Korean) (2015) with Professor Emeritus Eric K. Yamamoto and Sara Lee ‘13.

Following her graduation from law school, Professor Pettit-Toledo clerked for the Honorable Richard W. Pollack, then-Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawai‘i, and the Honorable Susan Oki Mollway, then-Senior District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii.  She later worked as a civil litigator with McCorriston Miller Mukai MacKinnon LLP, where her practice focused primarily on complex commercial litigation, appellate litigation, employment disputes, and debtors’ and creditors’ rights.  Professor Pettit-Toledo also served as the Executive Director and Managing Attorney for Maximum Legal Services Corporation, a local Hawai‘i 501(c)(3) non-profit specializing in trust and estate administration and conservatorship and guardianship services for people across the State of Hawai‘i.

For her accomplishments, Professor Pettit-Toledo has been recognized as a Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch for outstanding professional excellence in the areas of Alternative Dispute Resolution, Appellate Practice, Commercial Litigation, Labor and Employment Law – Management, Litigation – Bankruptcy, and Litigation – Real Estate.  She has also been recognized as a Super Lawyers Rising Star for outstanding lawyering in Business Litigation. 

During law school, Professor Pettit-Toledo served as a Case Note Editor and Publications Committee Editor for the University of Hawai‘i Law Review.  As a Sam L. Cohen Foundation International Human Rights Summer Fellow, she served as a summer law clerk in the Trial Chamber at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague, Netherlands, where she assisted in the trial of Prosecutor v. Ayyash, Badreddine, Merhi, Oneissi & Sabra, an in absentia criminal prosecution of terrorists who committed a bombing of political figures in Beirut, Lebanon under both international law and Lebanese criminal procedure and law. 

Professor Pettit-Toledo currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Hawai‘i State Bar Association’s Leadership Institute and co-leads a session each year on “Doing the Right Thing.”  She also serves on the Hawai‘i Supreme Court’s Committee on Equality and Access to the Courts.

Publications

Journal Articles, Essays, and Book Chapters

• Collective Memory & The Temporality of Justice:  Healing Trauma Across Generations After Historic Injustices, 35 Transnat’l L. & Contemp. Probs. __ (forthcoming 2025).
• The Politics of Proportionality in State Civil Rulemaking, 101 Denv. L. Rev. 641 (2024). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
• Healing Intergenerational Wounds in Present-Day Jeju Redress: United States-South Korea-Jeju Support for the Jeju 4.3 Trauma Healing Center, 12 World Environ. & Island Studies J. 107 (2024) (with Elizabeth “Kalei” Akau).  SSRN | ScholarSpace
• United States Apology and Reparations for Its Role in the Jeju 4.3 Tragedy: Healing the Persisting Wounds Across Generations, in Jeju’s Past, Present and Future: Peace-Building for Co-Prosperity, at 95-102 (2024) (book chapter with Eric K. Yamamoto).  Amazon | ScholarSpace
• Collective Memory and Intersectional Identities:  Healing Unique Sexual Violence Harms Against Women of Color Past, Present and Future, 45 U. Haw. L. Rev. 346 (2023). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
• Bridging the Chasm:  Reconciliation’s Needed Implementation Fourth Step, 15 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 109 (2016) (with Eric K. Yamamoto and Sarah Sheffield). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
• A Crucial 2016 Next Step Toward Jeju April Third Reconciliation:  United States Responsibility for Social Healing Through Justice, in Jeju 4.3 Grand Tragedy During Peacetime Korea: The Asia-Pacific Context (1947-2016) (2016) (book chapter with Eric K. Yamamoto et al.)
• Who Is Worthy of Redress?:  Recognizing Sexual Violence Injustice Against Women of Color as Uniquely Redress-Worthy—Illuminated by a Case Study on Kenya’s Mau Mau Women and Their Unique Harms, 30 Berkeley J. Gender L. & Just. 268 (2015).  HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
• Unfinished Business:  A Joint United States and South Korea Jeju 4.3 Tragedy Task Force to Further Implement Recommendations and Foster Comprehensive and Enduring Social Healing Through Justice, 15 Asia-Pac. L. & Pol’y J. 1 (2014) (with Eric K. Yamamoto and Sara Lee). HeinOnline | SSRN | ScholarSpace
• What’s Next?:  A Joint United States and South Korea Jeju 4.3 Tragedy Task to Further Implement Recommendations and Foster Comprehensive and Enduring “Social Healing Through Justice,” 2 World Environment and Island Studies 1 (2013) (with Eric K. Yamamoto).

Book

Jeju 4.3 Solutions: Korea – United States Jeju 4.3 Task Force (with Eric K. Yamamoto and Sara Lee, translated into Korean by Jin Ho Kim) (2015).

Recent Media

KHON2 – What’s the Law?, “The Future of Abortion and IVF in America,” Invited Speaker, by Coralie Chun Matayoshi, July 12, 2024.

Hawai‘i Public Radio, “Panel Discussion on the Status of IVF in Hawai‘i,” Invited Speaker (with Dr. Celia Dominguez) by Catherine Cruz, Host of The Conversation, March 1, 2024.