Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund Records
Call Number
Dates
Creator
Extent
Language of Materials
Abstract
Founded in 1974, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) is a national organization that protects and promotes the civil rights of Asian Americans. By combining litigation, advocacy, education, and organizing, AALDEF works with Asian American communities across the country to secure human rights for all. The AALDEF focuses on critical issues affecting Asian Americans, including immigrant rights, civic participation and voting rights, economic justice for workers, language access to services, Census policy, affirmative action, youth rights and educational equity, housing and environmental justice, and the elimination of anti-Asian violence, police misconduct, and human trafficking. The Asian American Legal Defense Fund Records principally contains legal case files (many are closed), principally labor law cases, most involving restaurant and garment industry workers, but also including immigration cases. There are also labbor-related arbitration files, and subject files on the Chinatown Labor Fair, and on immigration, labor, and housing.
Historical/Biographical Note
Founded in 1974, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) is a national organization that protects and promotes the civil rights of Asian Americans. By combining litigation, advocacy, education, and organizing, AALDEF works with Asian American communities across the country to secure human rights for all. The AALDEF focuses on critical issues affecting Asian Americans, including immigrant rights, civic participation and voting rights, economic justice for workers, language access to services, Census policy, affirmative action, youth rights and educational equity, housing and environmental justice, and the elimination of anti-Asian violence, police misconduct, and human trafficking.
AALDEF engages in the following activities: litigates cases that have major impact on the Asian American community; provides legal resources for community-based organizations and facilitates grassroots community organizing efforts; conducts free, multilingual legal advice clinics for low-income Asian Americans and new immigrants; educates Asian Americans about their legal rights; comments on proposed legislation and governmental policies; and trains students in public interest law and encourages them to use their legal skills to serve the community.
Arrangement
This collection has not been arranged by an archivist. The materials are arranged in the order in which they were received from the donor.
Scope and Content Note
The Asian American Legal Defense Fund Records principally contains legal case files (many are closed), principally labor law cases, most involving restaurant and garment industry workers, but also including immigration cases. There are also labbor-related arbitration files, and subject files on the Chinatown Labor Fair, and on immigration, labor, and housing.
Subjects
Organizations
Genres
People
Topics
Conditions Governing Access
Materials are open without restrictions.
Conditions Governing Use
Any rights (including copyright and related rights to publicity and privacy) held by Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund were transferred to New York University in 2011 by the Executive Director, Margaret Fung. Permission to publish or reproduce materials in this collection must be secured from the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive. Please contact tamiment.wagner@nyu.edu.
Preferred Citation
Identification of item, date; Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund Records; TAM 321; box number; folder number or item identifier; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
Location of Materials
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Donated by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in 2003; additional materials were found in the repository in 2014. The accession numbers associated with this collection are 2003.012 and 2014.035.
http://www.aaldef.org/ was initially selected by curators and captured through the use of The California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service in 2007 as part of the Other Left Activism Web Archive. n November 2015, this website was migrated to Archive-It. Archive-It uses web crawling technology to capture websites at a scheduled time and displays only an archived copy, from the resulting WARC file, of the website. In November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/user/AALDEF/videos/ was added. The accession number associated with this website is 2022.026/
Take Down Policy
Archived websites are made accessible for purposes of education and research. NYU Libraries have given attribution to rights holders when possible; however, due to the nature of archival collections, we are not always able to identify this information.
If you hold the rights to materials in our archived websites that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials.
If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by submitting a notice, with the elements described below, to the special.collections@nyu.edu.
Please include the following in your notice: Identification of the material that you believe to be infringing and information sufficient to permit us to locate the material; your contact information, such as an address, telephone number, and email address; a statement that you are the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed and that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement that the information in the notification is accurate and made under penalty of perjury; and your physical or electronic signature. Upon receiving a notice that includes the details listed above, we will remove the allegedly infringing material from public view while we assess the issues identified in your notice.
About this Guide
Processing Information
In 2014, the archived website was added to the finding aid. An additional website was added to the finding aid in 2022.
Revisions to this Guide
Repository
View Inventory
Chan, et al v. City of New York, The Department of Housing Preservation and Development of the City of New York and Chinese-American Planning Council, Inc. (Unprocessed), 1990-1994, inclusive
Chan, et al v. City of New York, The Department of Housing Preservation and Development of the City of New York and Chinese-American Planning Council, Inc. (Unprocessed), 1990-1994, inclusive
Lin Plaintiffs vs. East River Chinese Restaurant, 1995-2000, inclusive
Chung, et al v. New Silver Palace Restaurant, et al. (Unprocessed), 2002, inclusive
Chung, et al v. New Silver Palace Restaurant, et al. (Unprocessed), 2000-2001, inclusive
Chung, et al v. New Silver Palace Restaurant, et al. (Unprocessed), 2002, inclusive
Chung, et al v. New Silver Palace Restaurant, et al. (Unprocessed), 1995, 2001-2003, inclusive
"Golden Venture" Immigration Case, 1993-1997, inclusive
"Golden Venture" Immigration Case, 1993-1997, inclusive
"Golden Venture" Immigration Case, 1993, inclusive
"Golden Venture" Immigration Case, 1993, inclusive
"Golden Venture" Immigration Case (Unprocessed), 1994-1995, inclusive
Hotel, Restaurant and Club Employees and Bartenders Union, Local 6 (Hawaii Kai Restaurant) Arbitration (Unprocessed), 1982-1983, inclusive
Chan, et al v. Jing Fong Restaurant, 1985-2005, inclusive
Chan, et al v. Jing Fong Restaurant, 1996-1999, inclusive
Health Personnel Resources, Inc v. Casillan, et al., 1970-1987, inclusive
Tsang et al v. Jenna Lane, Inc., Zeke-N-Zoe LLC and Tradition Knits, Inc., et al (Unprocessed), 2000-2003, inclusive
Tsang, et al v. Jenna Lane, Inc., Zeke-N-Zoe LLC and Tradition Knits, Inc., et al (Unprocessed), 1998-2001, inclusive
Zhao, et al v. Tracy Evans, Inc. (Unprocessed), 1998-1999, inclusive
Zhao, et al v. Tracy Evans, Inc. (Unprocessed), 1998-1999, inclusive
Workers Compensation Cases: Choudhury, Dumpangol, Perfetto, 1999-2002, inclusive
Ahmed v. Hoque Sulehria v. Coney Island Hospital INS Cases Equality Foundation v. Cinncinati (Unprocessed) Hughes v. Shalala (Unprocessed) Romer v. Evans (Unprocessed) US v. Yvonne Melendez-Carrion (Unprocessed) Boston Firefighters Case (Unprocessed), 1993-2002, inclusive
Affirmative Action Cases: Bakke, De Funis (Unprocessed) Peter M. Lin v. (Foley Square Construction Worker EEOC Case) (Unprocessed), 1973-1993, inclusive
Wu, et al v. Henry Mui, et al (Unprocessed) Dewey Wong Restaurant Arbitration (Unprocessed) Shinwa Restaurant Arbitration (Unprocessed) House of Chan Arbitration (Unprocessed), 1980-1998, inclusive
Chinatown Labor Fair, 1987-1992, inclusive
Subject Files: Immigration, Labor, Housing, 1978-2001, inclusive
Archived Websites
Extent
Scope and Content Note
The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund was founded in 1974 to advocate for the civil rights of Asian American communities through litigation, education, and support for community organizing. The website was first crawled in September 2007. It contained press releases describing legal battles pertaining to Asian American civil rights, as well as a list of the AALDEF's programs, including 9/11 disaster response, Affirmative Action, anti-Asian bias, anti-trafficking initiative, economic justice, educational equity, equal access to services, immigrants' rights, leadership development, and voting rights. In 2010, the website was temporarily replaced with a page explaining that the website was under construction. In 2011, the website was relaunched with a new design. The update added a blog section written by Emil Guillermo that focuses on current events relating to political, legal, and social justice for Asian Americans. It also added separate sections for publications by the AALDEF and a litigation docket to read about their notable cases. In 2019, the website was once again updated, with the new design highlighting the AALDEF's Economic Justice for Workers, Immigrant Rights, and Voting Rights & Democracy programs. The updated site contained a new section for press releases, which had formerly been published in the News section, while the News section began featuring articles written by external media outlets. The redesign also added a section for events hosted by the organization. In 2020, the website's blog also began featuring a podcast hosted by Guillermo. At the time this was written in the fall of 2021, the AALDEF's programs included anti-trafficking, Census 2020, economic justice for workers, educational equity, housing & environmental justice, immigrant rights, voting rights & democracy, and the #StopAsianHate Project.
Also includes the YouTube Channel for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Videos topics cover speeches from the Justice in Action Awards, anniversary videos, and election protection volunteer training. Videos date back to 2008.
Accruals
New site crawls are accrued semiannually.
Appraisal
Crawl was limited to domains and subdomains of aaldef.org in order to remain within the collection scope and data constraints.
YouTube Channel was added to attempt to capture the videos embedded in the website.
Physical Characteristics and Technical Requirements
Due to technical or privacy issues, archived websites may not be exact copies of the original website at the time of the web crawl. Certain file types will not be captured dependent on how they are embedded in the site. Other parts of websites that the crawler has difficulty capturing includes Javascript, streaming content, database-driven content, and highly interactive content. Full-Text searches of archived websites are available at https://archive-it.org/organizations/567.
Externally hosted content
https://wayback.archive-it.org/6351/*/http://aaldef.org/
Externally hosted content
https://wayback.archive-it.org/6351/*/https://www.youtube.com/user/AALDEF/videos/
