A Legend to Many

Following an education steeped in Catholic social teaching and a career in public service as a prosecutor, trial judge and Washington State Supreme Court justice—not to mention an instructor and Jurist-in-Residence at the Seattle University School of Law—Mary Yu will retire at the end of 2025.

When asked how she feels to be called a legend, Yu sees it as happenstance. The first Asian, first Latina and first lesbian to serve on the state’s highest court—along with the first woman of color to be elected statewide—she sees these distinctions as the result of circumstance in a life devoted to others.

“I don't live my life by design,” she says. “Life provided incredible opportunities for me to serve.”

In the late 1980s, Yu had been working in the Peace and Justice Office for the Archdiocese of Chicago, her hometown, when she realized she could do more to further the values of a just society. She saw the law as the way.

“I was doing community organizing, social justice work for 10 years for the church, and it was important to try to persuade people to do the right thing because of the correct moral vision that the church offered,” she says. “But after 10 years of doing it, at some point I said, ‘Gosh, sometimes you need some other tools in the toolkit.’ And one of them happened to be the law.”

Yu arrived in Seattle in the late 1980s but returned to the Midwest for law school at Notre Dame University, coming back to Seattle for holidays and summer breaks before graduating. Drawn to trial work, her first job after passing the bar in 1993 was with the King County Prosecutor’s Office as a criminal deputy then a civil deputy.

After rising through the ranks of the prosecutor’s office, Yu landed an opening in 2000 on the King County Superior Court bench, another occasion where through happenstance she found a new way to serve.

“It just happened to be that a judge came to me and said, ‘I'm retiring and I think you'd be a great judge and why don't you apply?’” she recalls. “And that was the first time I thought about it.”

Yu served as a trial judge in King County for 14 years until 2014, when former Gov. Jay Inslee appointed her to the state’s high court. To retain her seat, she won election three times. While serving as a judicial officer, she found her work informed by her values. 

“The values that I bring to my job are really rooted in my Catholic upbringing and my understanding of myself and my social responsibility to others,” she says. “So, it's really important. Process is important. Respect for the human person is important. The protection of individual rights is important. And so all those things do flow from Catholic social teaching and my understanding of who I am in the context of faith.”

In retirement, Yu plans to continue her life of service, volunteering with literacy projects, attending games of her beloved Seattle Mariners (Cal Raleigh is her favorite player) and perhaps writing children's books.

“Maybe the most important thing is I want to be able to wake up, have a cup of coffee and actually read the news—not jump out of bed and run off to work,” she says.

No stranger to the classrooms at the law school’s Sullivan Hall, where she taught a transition to practice class for more than a decade before a break over the past two years, Yu plans to teach a constitutional law class in January. As far as her role as Jurist-in-Residence, she sees it as being available to both students and faculty for consulting, conversations and mentoring. Retirement from the bench won’t keep her away.

“As long as the dean wants me to do it, I will absolutely do it.”