Our Board

Aruna Masih has been a member and leader in Oregon’s legal community for over 25 years. She and her husband came here in 1997, after law school, with an appreciation for Oregon’s natural beauty and a goal to use their legal education to serve the community. She pursued a civil rights and worker rights law practice with the Portland law firm of Bennett Hartman, LLP, and her husband became a public defender. She has also served as Chair of the Oregon State Bar Association’s Advisory Committee for Diversity and Inclusion and Labor and Employment Section Executive Committee and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Oregon Minority Lawyers Association, the Oregon Women Lawyers Foundation, the Oregon Women Lawyers, the South Asian Bar Association of Oregon, and the Multnomah Bar Association. Aruna attends Calvary Presbyterian Church and has been a Constitution Team coach at McDaniel High School since 2017. Public service was instilled in Aruna at an early age by her parents, a Punjabi Indian father and British mother, who served as medical missionaries in a rural hospital in Punjab, India. She was born in New York but grew up in India, returning to this country in high school. While in India, she and her brothers attended Woodstock School, an international school in the Himalayan mountains. She feels a deep connection to the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and is grateful to have found a home and an opportunity to serve the community here in Oregon. In August of 2023, Governor Tina Kotek appointed Aruna to the Oregon Supreme Court. She was sworn into office as a Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court on September 1, 2023.