Shirley Ann Higuchi, the chair of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, has been named lawyer of the year by the Bar Association of the District of Columbia for her work promoting social justice and bringing together people of different viewpoints to find common solutions.
In June, Higuchi was elected president-elect of the BADC, which started in 1871. She is the group’s first Asian American president. She will become president in June of 2025.
BADC is the second Washington-area legal organization Higuchi has led, She was the president of the DC Bar, the nation’s third-largest mandatory membership organization for lawyers, in 2003 and 2004.
“I’m honored to follow President Rawle Andrews Jr. in leading this forward-thinking group of lawyers committed to helping the Washington legal community accomplish the goal of equal justice for all Americans,” Higuchi said.
In July 2023, Higuchi led a delegation of BADC members, federal judges and lawyers to Heart Mountain to learn about the World War II incarceration that forced 14,000 Japanese Americans to live behind the barbed wire at the camp in Northwestern Wyoming.
This year, Higuchi presided over the opening of the Mineta-Simpson Institute, which is dedicated to helping Americans bridge partisan divides in the spirit of Secretary Norman Mineta and Senator Alan Simpson, who first met as Boy Scouts at Heart Mountain in 1943.
Other BADC members to be honored with Higuchi at the organization’s dinner in December include Elaine R. Jones, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who will receive the group’s Hon. Annice M. Wagner Pioneer Award.
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, a Smithsonian Affiliate, preserves the site where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated in Wyoming from 1942 through 1945. Their stories are told within the foundation’s museum, Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell.
