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There are multiple events in Sabrina McKenna’s life that have shaped the Hawaii Supreme Court justice’s career path, but perhaps the one that made the biggest impact was when she heard about the University of Hawaii women’s basketball team holding tryouts.
In 1974, McKenna was a freshman at UH majoring in Japanese when her roommate, Toni Trives, told her about the tryouts. She attended the tryouts, having played basketball on the military and Department of Defense bases she grew up on in Japan.
“I had that opportunity that a lot of local girls here did not actually have,” she said in a recent phone interview.
With the exception of future UH basketball coach Patsy Dung’s Kalihi Jets, girls basketball was near non-existent in Hawaii at that point — the first Hawaii High School Athletic Association girls basketball tournament was in 1977 — and McKenna’s experience playing the sport gave her an advantage that netted her a roster spot.
A point guard in high school, McKenna played nearly every position on the court for UH and was one of its better rebounders right away (Dung credited the freshman McKenna and Kathy Duquette as the best rebounders on the team that year, according to a newspaper clipping).
“The people on my team weren’t that tall,” the 5-foot-7 McKenna said. “I had to play the forward positions and under the basket a lot more than I did when I was in high school.”
Under the basket or on the court, McKenna also took a leadership role as her career progressed.
“She was always a leader and motivating her teammates,” said Dennis Agena, an assistant coach under Dung at UH. “Sabrina was a good person at communicating and getting the girls to be on the same page and to work and play as hard as they could.”
Playing basketball at UH also came with a scholarship, which for McKenna — who was paying non-resident tuition — was a surprise.
“I just wanted to play basketball,” McKenna said. “When I made the team and she offered me a scholarship, I had no idea that was even a possibility because I had not heard of Title IX at that point.”
Interest in Title IX and its co-author Patsy Takemoto Mink led to McKenna leaning toward attending law school. When UH women’s volleyball player Marilyn Moniz — the first woman to win the school’s Jack Bonham Award in 1976 — attended law school right after her playing days, it showed McKenna the possibility that athletes could go to law school.
“Being raised by a single mom (McKenna’s father died when she was 9 years old), I never envisioned that I would become a lawyer or a judge. Definitely never a Supreme Court justice,” she said. “It’s been quite an experience in life.”
Growing up in Japan, McKenna played basketball and volleyball on the military bases, but it was in basketball that she became a gym rat that not only played for the high school and U.S. military women’s teams but against other male soldiers in the base gym.
“I was basically doing a lot more shooting from the outside,” McKenna said about playing against the latter. “But I would get in there and box people out, and get rebounds.”
She graduated high school at 16 years old and moved from Japan to Hawaii to attend UH, thinking she would be a Japanese-English interpreter. It was during college that McKenna decided she wanted to do more.
“I didn’t just want to be interpreting what other people were saying,” she said. “I decided I wanted to become a lawyer instead to give people a voice and perhaps even have a voice myself instead.”
McKenna was the editor-in-chief of the law review at UH’s Richardson School of Law and earned her Juris Doctor from the school in 1982. During her first year, one of her professors was appointed to be a judge, and the thought that she could consider becoming one down the line crossed her mind but didn’t sway her toward aiming to become a judge.
She went to work as an associate in civil litigation at Goodsill Anderson Quinn & Stifel. One of the firm’s clients, Otaka Inc., offered her a position as their in-house counsel, and she traveled the world for about three years helping the company make real estate investments before she ended up back in Hawaii full-time in 1990.
“It was realizing that with a lot of people I saw, wealth was not bringing happiness, and the local people that I was hanging out with in Hawaii were a lot happier people, even if they didn’t have a lot of money,” she told the Star-Advertiser in 2011.
McKenna applied for a judgeship but did not make the Judicial Selection Committee’s list. She was able to join the Richardson School of Law as an assistant professor, and two and a half years later, she made the Judicial Selection Committee’s list and was appointed to be a district court judge.
She was nominated to the circuit court in 1995 by then-Governor Ben Cayetano. Then-Chief Justice Ronald Moon asked her to be the senior judge of Family Court in 2009, and two years later, she applied for and was successfully appointed as a justice on the state’s Supreme Court, a position she still holds today.
“It was one of the biggest honors of my life to be nominated to this position,” McKenna said. “I’m just so honored to have been able to do what I’ve been doing.”
According to McKenna, there is no “normal day” in the Supreme Court. Most of their work is not in the public eye, and their duties range from legal work such as reviewing written submissions and preparing oral arguments for cases to reviewing proposed rules and considering rules changes in all of the courts.
McKenna is also the first openly LGBTQ+ member of the Hawaii Supreme Court and the first openly LGBTQ+ Asian Pacific American to serve on a state Supreme Court. It was important to her that she be open, having been a Family Court judge.
At the time McKenna was appointed to the Supreme Court, LGBTQ statistics were not favorable, especially for Asian Pacific Americans such as herself.
“I saw how a lot of LGBTQ youth are treated. People need to recognize that a lot of LGBTQ youth are grossly over-represented in the homeless youth population because especially for transgender youth, parents will kick them out of their homes,” she said.
“That’s why I thought it was important for people like me to be open. I just wanted to provide more hope and for the parents to see that you could be gay and still have a good life. They could see that ‘Hey, wait, she’s going to be a Supreme Court Justice, and she has children. You can live a normal life and be a member of the LGBTQ community.’ People see that so much more now. Even 11 years ago, you didn’t see that as much because this was before same-sex marriage was legalized in Hawaii and in the United States.”
Even with her accomplishments, McKenna is quick to say she is a regular person. She has three kids — her eldest graduated from law school recently, her middle child is also in law school and her youngest is a member of the Army Reserve and attending Kapiolani Community College — as well as a dog from the Humane Society. Prior to her kids, she played basketball and soccer in women’s leagues.
“There were some women’s basketball leagues for a while, so my friends and I would play in that but after a while, there were no women’s basketball outside leagues,” McKenna said. “A bunch of my basketball friends decided we would start playing soccer, so we formed a team and started playing in the women’s leagues because there’s so many.”
Right now, McKenna has started to sing karaoke again since it is slowly starting to return after the onset of the pandemic (Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park” or Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” are her go-to songs).
“I’m basically a regular person with a regular life,” she said. “I just have this wonderful job that allows me to try to give back to the community in whatever way I can.”
In May, McKenna and Jennifer Rose, the director of UH’s Office of Institutional Equity, published an article in the Hawaii Bar Journal commemorating the 50 years since Title IX was enacted. In the final paragraph, McKenna stated:
“Patsy Mink changed my life because she fought for Title IX and its implementing regulations, which enabled me to receive a University of Hawai’i athletic scholarship and then be admitted to law school; I wouldn’t have those opportunities had I finished high school before 1972.”
“A law that has transformed schools and society is rightfully named for a woman from Hawai‘i, the incomparable Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink,” Rose wrote. “Perhaps the law and its legacy can be considered a gift of aloha to the world.”
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Sabrina McKenna
University of Hawaii women’s basketball player (1974-78)
Education
>> Yokota High School (Japan), University of Hawaii (Bachelor’s in Japanese, Juris Doctor)
Highlights
>> Justice, Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii (2011–present)
>> First openly LGBTQ+ member of the Hawaii Supreme Court
>> First openly LGBTQ+ Asian Pacific American to serve on a state Supreme Court
>> Honolulu district court judge (1993-95)
>> Circuit court judge (1995-2011)
>> Assistant professor at UH’s William S. Richardson School of Law (1990-93)
June 23, 2022, marked the 50th anniversary of Title IX. To commemorate this watershed event, the Star-Advertiser will publish a series of stories celebrating the achievements of female pioneers and leaders with Hawaii ties.
Click here to view the Title IX series.
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