A Criminal Defense Lawyer who is a Muslim becomes a Muslim Defense Lawyer

One of us on the "Keeping the Faith" panel was a Muslim, Khurrum Wahid, a distinguished criminal defense lawyer.  The moderator asked him what made him decide to go to law school.  He didn't exactly answer the question, but he did say that, as we "undoubtedly already knew," if one is a young person from a South Asian family (he referred to himself as a Pak-Asian, as his family was apparently from Pakistan), then of course you go to medical school.

But not him.

He said there was great consternation in his family and his faith community with his decision.  An uncle said to him that, "Back home, lawyers are liars."  (As the American public seems to preceive lawyers, we obviously have more in common with the Pakistani public than we might think.)  But Khurrum went to law school anyway, and from there into criminal defense work.

Then, he said, 9-11 occurred.  He overnight went from being a criminal defense lawyer who was a Muslim to a Muslim criminal defense lawyer.  Mothers, wives, sisters, daughters called him because their male family members had been "detained" by federal agents - not arrested, because that would have required charges to be filed - but "detained."   Suddenly, his family and community were very glad to have a lawyer in the midst.

I discovered that one can laugh and be appalled at the same time.  One can laugh at the irony.  And be appalled at what the government did.   I'm also glad that Khurrum went to law school.

A Very Pleasant Time at the FIU College of Law "Keeping the Faith" Panel

Here are two photos from the FIU College of Law Keeping the Faith Panel event today.  The first photo is of me standing with three students from the Religious Studies  program.  A number of them attended and the chairperson of the Religious Studies department, Erik Larson, moderated.  (Do read Dr. Larson's bio at the link.  Amazing man.)

The second photo is of the panelists, the moderator, the student association representatives who planned the event (one from each of the Muslim, Roman Catholic, Jewish, and CLS law student organizations), and Gary Cameron, the IVCF staff member for the FIU graduate programs, who is an adviser for the CLS group.

It has been many years since my last visit to the FIU Campus.  The place is simply transformed!  Dr. Larson told me that there are over 54,000 FIU students and the university is number 5 on the list of America's largest public universities.

The College of Law has a very impressive building, all its own.

The President of the CLS chapter at the FIU College of Law is Jesica Geevarghese, who is Indian Orthodox.  (She is second from the left in the second photo.) She told me that the Indian Orthodox Church is from the Eastern side of Christendom and has a history that goes back to the Apostle Thomas.  Her church in Broward is St. Thomas Orthodox Church.

"Give us some real world advice: what is in store for us, as persons of religious faith, once we graduate and start practicing? Does being a person of faith make it easier or harder to be a good lawyer? What advice would you give a new, beginning lawyer?"

To my mind, being a person of faith makes it easier to be a lawyer. We are not all alone in dealing with reality. God is a God of Love. He created us with a purpose. He loves us. He has made provision for our shortcomings by sending his son, Jesus, so that we could, despite those shortcomings, be transformed through the work of the Holy Spirit into the sort of person, even the sort of lawyer, God meant us to be.

Here is some advice I might give:

1. Be a part of a faith community, study the Word, and have an active prayer life.

2. Study hard while one is in law school, and work hard in the profession.

3. Find a practice situation where there are older lawyers who can mentor you and whom you can admire, both as practitioners and people.

4. Get out of a practice situation in which you are unhappy as soon as you can.

5. Live a modest life, spend only what you must. Live below the standard of living at which you might otherwise be able to live or at which your peers appear to live. Do not borrow money to support an immodest life-style.

4. If God brings a person into your life who would make a supportive spouse and a good parent and who shares your faith, then by all means get that person to marry you and then, after a reasonable period of time, start a family with that person. God calls most of us into marriage and direct family formation. However, he calls some very special people into singleness. Jesus himself was single, as was the Apostle Paul.

"How does your religious faith affect the way you act towards other lawyers and clients?"

As to my clients, I hope it means that I have their best interests at heart and not my own. As to my partners and associates, I have the same hope.  Really, if I have eternity with the Lord to look forward to, why shouldn’t I seek the best interests of the people whom I serve?

As to my adversaries, whether opposing counsel or their clients, I owe them ethical behavior, respect, and courtesy.  In a way, by my being a reasonable, competent advocate, I am serving their best interests as well as the best interests of my clients, because I am being faithful to the system that we have of settling disputes.  In this way, one serves one's enemy, one expresses a kind of love even to them, approaching the standard that Jesus taught when he enjoined us to love our enemies.

"Tell us stories: do you have an example when your beliefs helped you perform as a professional, helped you be an effective advocate or counselor, and contributed to your success?"

I hate to make mistakes as a lawyer, but I have made some whoppers. How does one deal with them? I think that being a good neighbor, as God calls us to be, means that we disclose our professional mistakes and deal with them directly and in good faith.

In one case, I had recommended what I thought was brilliant, if original, tax-saving estate planning strategy to a client.  She and her attorney son in New England agreed with it and it was implemented. When she died, I asked my partner Juan to handle the settlement. In the course of his review, he came across that estate planning strategy, and he told me that he believed that it did not work. I reviewed the matter again and, with the benefit of hindsight, it looked like a problem to me too.  A big problem.

I called the decedent’s son and told him about the matter. He promptly hired a New England malpractice lawyer who wrote me a nasty letter. He also hired a Palm Beach probate lawyer to handle the rest of the estate.

I met with the malpractice lawyer, the new probate lawyer, and two of my NY partners at the NY offices of my firm. It was a dreadful trip to take from Miami to NY, for the estate stood to lose over a million dollars, if I had indeed been mistaken.

At the meeting, my NY partners said that they did not necessarily agree that I had made a mistake and instead believed that I had, in fact, saved the family a lot of money. They demanded that the new probate lawyer take my position on the Estate Tax Return, while making a full disclosure on that return of the suspect strategy. They were not asking that anything be covered up.

After I got home to Miami,  the Palm Beach lawyer called me. He said that he was impressed that I had spoken up about the problem and not attempted to hide it from the client or the IRS.  He said that he saw in the matter a mistake that he could very well have made. He also said the he would present the strategy fairly on the estate tax return, and that we would see what would happen.

About six months later he called me. My secretary told me he was on the telephone, and with trepidation I picked up the call. He said that the return had been accepted by the IRS fully and completely. He was nearly as happy as I was, and since then he and I have become great friends.

"Tell us stories: do you have an example of a time when your beliefs conflicted with the professional expectations of your firm, judicial position, etc.? How did you deal with the conflict? What did the experience teach you?"

What immediately comes to mind is an experience I had on a trip to the New York headquarters of the firm with which my Miami firm had merged during the 1980s. I flew up to New York City early on a Monday morning, expecting the meetings I was to attend to last all day, and that I would return late that night.

Instead, the meetings ended just after lunch. I spoke to people at the travel desk of the firm about my getting an earlier flight back to Miami. I said that if I could get home by six or so, I would be able to attend a board meeting at my church.

The person I was speaking to stopped what she was doing, put her pencil down, looked at me, and said, “What? You have another life?”

Thus, the main problem I have had with the profession has been balancing my family life and my professional life. I remember going to Washington DC and then to Tampa on a series of depositions in a case with several parties and, so, several lawyers. We were at least two days on this junket. At the end of the last day, I found myself in the airport bar, waiting for a flight back to Miami, and having a beer with one of the other lawyers, a younger lawyer, a senior associate in a big New York firm.

He told me that two huge things had happened to him that day. He had gotten a phone call from one of the senior partners of his firm who told him that the firm had just voted him in as a partner. The other thing was a call from his secretary to tell him that she had just accepted service of process on his behalf in divorce proceedings initiated by his wife.

As a result of trying to achieve a reasonable work-family balance (and also trying to tell the truth on my timeslips), I have always been at the very bottom of the billable hour derby with my fellow associates and partners. It was always a miracle to me that I was tolerated as a partner by the national firm in which I was a partner, although I took some serious financial hits along the way.

But, while my children were small, I made a point to be home for supper time during the week. We took vacations during which I seemed to spend a great deal of time worrying about my cases, at least during the first several days of them. I tried to remain attentive to my wife and to honor her. I took the entire family to church each Sunday, that is, I supplied a sort of spiritual leadership in our family. I was an active member of our church, took on leadership responsibilities, and taught a high school Sunday School class as my children moved through their high school years. I think it made a huge difference in our family’s life, whatever it did to my legal career. Sunday remained a day of church-going and of rest. Church participation still remains a priority for my wife and me, long after the children have left home.

As to worldly success, Jesus teaches that we should seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness and that all the other important things in life will be added to us as well.

"How has your religious faith prepared you or benefited you in your professional life?"

There is an ethical dimension of the Christian faith, of course. That dimension has certainly informed my professional life. Truth telling and competence, treating all people as neighbors, not just people who look like me and think like me, having courage and taking risks, leading by serving, all of these things Jesus taught. They have made me a better lawyer.

My Christian faith defines a particular reality that has informed my practice. First, I believe that there is a just, all-powerful and gracious God, one whose spirit empowers me to follow his will to the extent I choose to be so empowered, and a God to whom I will account at some point in the future, either during my lifetime, if the Messiah returns during my lifetime, or after my death when, at the Second coming, I will be raised from the dead and among the first to greet the Messiah at that coming. In connection with that coming, there will be a judgment day at which God will set everything straight.

This belief helps me deal with the big questions, such as why a loving and sovereign God would tolerate such suffering in our present world, and the small questions about how I am to deal with suffering and joy in my personal life and with my successes and failures as a lawyer.

This belief in such a spectacular end to history also gives teeth to what Jesus taught as the greatest commandment, that I am to love God with all my heart, soul, and strength, and that there is second commandment that amounts to the same thing, that I am to love my neighbor as myself.

That is the standard to which God will hold me at some point in my future and part of that accountability will be how I behaved as a lawyer.

"How, if at all, did your faith influence your decision to pursue the legal profession?"

I am appearing on a panel at the FIU law school today to discuss the application of faith to the practice of law.  The organizers of the event circulated some questions that the moderator may ask us.  To help prepare myself for this (to me) very unusual event, I wrote out answers to most of them.  The title of this post is the first question.  Here's what I wrote.

As an undergraduate, I majored in history and focused on the history of religion in America, more particularly in the antebellum South. With a sort of righteous indignation, I pursued the question of how people in the South who called themselves Christians could tolerate a slaveholding society.

In the course of the pursuit, I came across a minister from a slave-owning family who pastored a church in Midway, Georgia, during the 1830s. He founded an association called the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in Liberty County, Georgia. This minister, whose name was Charles Jones, promoted not only religious instruction but also literacy among the slaves, the provision, recognition, and protection of marriage among those people, their freedom to assemble, and their freedom to move from place to place. He condemned selling off members of slave families and, finally, he asserted that slaves were human beings who were so worthwhile to God that he sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to die for them, just as he had for everyone else.

I found this to be a surprising and potentially subversive application of the Gospel, and I explored how he got away with such a ministry. There were several factors. He came from what appeared to be a wealthy and economically secure family, so there was power there.  In addition, the congregation at Midway Church had been founded by New Englanders two generations or so before, so there was probably a different intellectual tradition still at work. Furthermore, a reform movement was sweeping the country generally. Finally, about 50 years before Mr. Jones’ ministry, a Midway Church member had established a foundation, and that entity helped support the ministry. In other words, there was a means of financial support independent of the contemporary situation.

It interested me that this foundation, a creature of the law, in the hands of a Christian minister who fully understood the implications of the Gospel, could work within a repressive culture and make a positive impact. This study helped push me to the decision to go to law school and not to graduate school, which was the other choice that seemed to be open to me at the time. It was not the only factor in my going to law school, but it was an important one. I had the idea that I could make a more positive impact on the culture as a lawyer than as a scholar cloistered in the university. My faith holds that God calls us to make such an impact.

"Keeping the Faith" Panel Tomorrow at the FIU College of Law