Vallejos v Commissioner of Registration
Vallejos and Daniel Domingo appealed their cases to the Court of Final Appeal, and were respectively assigned the case numbers FACV 19 and 20/2012. They would be represented before the CFA by Michael Fordham; David Pannick continued to represent the Government. Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma rejected a further application for joinder by eight-year-old Liang Wing-ki, the Hong Kong-born daughter of mainland parents, whose next friend, mother Li Yinxian, filed suit on her behalf. Philip Dykes, for the applicant, argued that because Vallejos and Domingo's case would touch on issues of interpretation of the Basic Law under Article 158, Liang's interests would also be affected. In rejecting Liang's application, Ma stated: "We feel that the points you seem to argue are adequately covered and will be adequately covered". Liang and other Hong Kong-born children like her were ruled to be entitled to the right of abode in Hong Kong in the 2001 case "Director of Immigration v. Chong Fung Yuen".
Vanessa Ruiz
Judge Ruiz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and graduated from Wellesley College in 1972 with a BA in Philosophy and from Georgetown University Law Center in 1975. She was appointed to the Court of Appeals by President Bill Clinton on July 12, 1994 and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on October 7, 1994. Prior to being appointed to the Court, Judge Ruiz was Corporation Counsel (now called Attorney General of the District of Columbia) for the District of Columbia and an attorney in private practice, primarily in the Washington, D.C. office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. Early in her career, Judge Ruiz was one of the first women to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court, successfully representing a fair housing organization and its testers in "Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman", 455 U.S. 363 (1982), a seminal case setting the new standard for organizational standing in federal court.