Metropolitan News-Enterprise

 

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

 

Page 1

 

Former State Bar President Nobumoto Dies

 

By a MetNews Staff Writer

 

Karen S. Nobumoto, a retired deputy district attorney who served as State Bar president in 2001, has died, it was learned yesterday.

She was 70. Nobumoto succumbed in Las Vegas on May 10 after a prolonged illness.

Former State Bar President Patrick M. Kelly, now a mediator and arbitrator, remarked yesterday that Nobumoto “was a great leader but more than that was a fabulous person.”

 

Karen Nobumoto (1952-2022) is seen in a 2001 photo with her spaniel, Dom Perignon.

 

Coleman Comments

Roland Coleman, a former Los Angeles County Bar Association president, said:

“Karen Nobumoto was a unique and inspirational person.  Her first mark on the legal profession was to work with me and Earl Thomas to start the Langston Bar Association Mentor Program.  It assigned minority law students to lawyers to help them through the travails of law school.

“Karen was always a doer who made a difference.  In the late ’90s, when the State Bar was under attack by the state Legislature and the governor, she cobbled together a plan with others to survive that onslaught and emerge even stronger.”

He added:

“She will always be remembered for her kindness, good heart and dedication to improving the lives of those in the legal profession.”

Nobumoto, in a photo taken at her installation as State Bar president in 2001, is flanked by then-Chief Justice Ronald George, at left, and then-District Attorney Steve Cooley and outgoing State Bar President Palmer Madden.

 

Fairfax Area

Born April 1, 1952 in Cleveland, she was brought up in the Fairfax area of Los Angeles. Few of her classmates shared her ethnicity; her father was a Japanese American and her mother is African American.

In a 2001 interview, published in a special section of the METNEWS honoring the State Bar president as “Person of the Year,” her mother, Lena Nobumoto, said of her daughter:

“She’s very strong-willed. She’s determined. I did have to be persistent and rule with a firm hand. She wasn’t a difficult child. But a challenge.”

Nobumoto, after living for awhile in the East, then in Hawaii, returned to Los Angeles and earned a law degree at Southwestern. Nobumoto was admitted to practice on Dec. 11, 1989, and immediately joined the District Attorney’s Office.

Steve Cooley, then district attorney, said of Nobumoto’s ascendency to the post of State Bar president:

“This is such a positive thing for our office, and for the State Bar itself. It goes beyond historic.”

Nobumoto was the first minority woman to preside over the organization, the first Asian, the second woman and the third African American.

Indefatigable, she somehow managed to get by with only three to four hours of sleep each night.

Before moving out of the state to be cared for by her mother, owing to her illness, Nobumoto had an apartment, one room of which looked like a small video store, with rows of VHS tapes of movies. She also collected dolls and had exotic pets.

Nobumoto is survived by her mother.

 

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