Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project

Su Ming Yeh

Su Ming Yeh is the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, where she represents incarcerated people on their civil rights claims.  Ms. Yeh has litigated dozens of individual cases and class action suits challenging unconstitutional conditions for people who are incarcerated, institutionalized, or detained, and argued successfully before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.  These include a class action that obtained universal Hepatitis C treatment for over 5000 Pennsylvania prisoners, and successfully representing an immigration detainee who was sexually abused at the family immigration detention center in Pennsylvania.  She also served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she co-taught the Civil Practice Clinic for 5 years.

Prior to law school, she worked on social justice issues as a science teacher with the U.S. Peace Corps in the Kingdom of Tonga; the Executive Director of the Asian Professional Extension, Inc., a mentoring organization for Asian-American inner-city youth in New York City; and a community organizer with the Coalition for Asian-American Children and Families.

Ms. Yeh was the President of the Asian Pacific Bar Association of Pennsylvania in 2015 and currently serves on its board, is a board member of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, and a member of the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s House of Delegates. She is a previous co-chair of the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Civil Rights Committee, and previous Chair of the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Public Interest Section. Ms. Yeh graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was a Public Interest Scholar and Senior Editor of the Law Review, and graduated with Honors from Brown University.  Following law school, she clerked for the Hon. Gerard E. Lynch, U.S. District Court judge in the Southern District of New York.