Christian Choi

Christian Choi is a rising 2L at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, with a special interest in family defense and advocacy for parents involved in the state family regulation system.

Christian spent the first seven years of his life living in institutional care in Daegu, South Korea before being transnationally adopted. He received his B.A. in Public Affairs from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While taking coursework in development, early adversity and child welfare, he came to learn and recognize the harmful impacts of prolonged caregiver separation, disrupted attachments, and a racialized foster care system on the health and wellbeing of system-involved families and youth. Understanding the harms of family separation through a developmental lens, while also unlocking explanations to the complexities of his own adoption experience, sparked his passion for advocating for children and families in dependency court.

Prior to law school, Christian completed a year of JusticeCorps, an AmeriCorp program, helping provide civil forms assistance to self-represented litigants in Los Angeles County. He went on to intern at the Children’s Law Center of California (CLC), where he focused on child advocacy and produced a data-driven research project analyzing the influence of court recommendations by social workers and minors’ counsel on visitation outcomes for 178 CLC child clients. While interviewing CLC children, Christian was struck by how often their greatest wishes were simply to return home and reunite with their families. At UCLA, Christian also volunteered at the Semel Institute as a research assistant for UCLA TIES for Families, a research organization that provided multidisciplinary expertise and resources to prospective resource and adoptive parents.

At Berkeley Law, Christian is a student member of the Family Defense Project, where he supports participatory defense efforts led by system-impacted parents and organizers working to reduce unnecessary child removals and the scope of family surveillance. Christian is also a 2026 Bergstrom Child Welfare Law Fellow, and he is excited to continue developing his multidisciplinary advocacy for families at DREDF, where he’ll be supporting litigation in support of disability rights for parents and youth in the dependency system.