Note to self: The next time that you are granted a Press Pass to an event as a representative of Sepia Mutiny, at the very least you should bring a pen to take notes. That way you look more legit.
Yesterday I attended the North American South Asian Bar Association (NASABA) conference in D.C. I had to sheepishly admit to people who asked that I was not in fact an attorney like one of them. My “personal injury lawyer” cover was totally blown as evidenced by one very cute district court clerk from Chicago who called me out on it. No longer would I be able to walk amongst the lawyers and speak legalese with the reckless abandon that had served me so well in years past.
The general buzz at the conference was that the most compelling panel from Friday had been the one titled, 9/11 Commission Effects on the South Asian Community. Unfortunately I arrived in D.C. too late to attend. The panel that I was most looking forward to was the one titled, Politics, Identity, and Mobilization: South Asian Lawyers in Election 2004. This panel consisted of Democrats Reshma Saujani and Ro Khanna, as well as Republicans Dino Teppara, and Suhail Khan. The moderator was Deepa Iyer. I sat in the very front row and made eye contact just long enough to try and make the two Republicans feel uncomfortable. I kid, I kid. If I was a jerk I would have brought my laptop and started typing furiously whenever someone said something provocative or something that I disagreed with. I even thought about putting a sign on the cover of my laptop that read “I’m blogging about YOU right NOW,” but I needed people to trust me in order to get the story and cultivate future sources.
So what were my impressions? Before the start of this panel two competing sets of literature were distributed. Deepa, passed out SAALTÂ’s 2004 polling analysis (which I have blogged about previously) and Teppara passed out a home-grown stat sheet that described why the Republican Party was good for South Asians. The stage was thus set for what would surely be a partisan debate (which is always enjoyable). By the louder-than-physiologically-necessary inhalation and exhalation sounds coming from the audience behind me following partisan statements, it was pretty obvious that they were heavily left-leaning. As an aside, I should mention that Bobby Jindal was originally invited to be the keynote speaker for the conference but declined because he had other commitments. I know from speaking to a few attendees that a sizeable contingent of those present didn’t want him as the keynote anyways. ItÂ’s undeniable that despite the fact that NASABA is a non-partisan organization, many of its members work in the public interest and immigrant rights sectors which lean heavily to the left.
The overall chemistry in the room was more educational than the “meat” of the actual panel. People (both the panel and the audience) had to be skillful and polite while in actuality calling the other side “out-of-touch” (the Democrats) and “sell-outs” (the Republicans). The only criticism I had is that at times the panelists tended to speak from a script. Ro Khanna left me with the impression that he was still campaigning and Dino TepparaÂ’s answers were too controlled and carefully measured. For politicians this is a necessity and not something I’d be as critical of, but in a conference setting where we were amongst “our own” and having a frank discussion, it would have been more interesting if both sides would have more convincingly admitted to their weaknesses and what they disagreed with inside their own party. Saujani and KhanÂ’s answers seemed less rehearsed and their comments sharper, which is what I was hoping for during this session. The best question of the hour was posed by Subodh Chandra who is running for Attorney General in the state of Ohio. He started by saying (to paraphrase) that he had no problem with Teppara and Khan choosing to be in the Republican party if that is the party that they believed in, and that he was glad that there were South Asians who would hopefully help improve the Republican partyÂ’s policies. However, Chandra asked, how could they accept the fact that their party’s base was filled with people whose beliefs were quite extreme with regards to both religious and immigrant rights issues that affect South Asians. Khan tripped up as he attempted to convince the audience that Pat Robertson and the other religious right-wingers that Chandra mentioned were not in fact the voice of the Republican base. I don’t think anyone in the room bought that however. The session ran twenty minutes over but was interesting enough that nobody made a move for the door.
A couple other highlights I should mention. The keynote speaker at the evening banquet (who was an older, second or third generation prosecutor from Vancouver where there is a lot of brown on brown violence) had the most memorable quote of the night. “You aren’t a true lawyer until you’ve had to defend a Punjabi.” Also, the evening came to a close with a set by comedian Daniel Nainan. He’s half Indian and half Japanese. How do I know? Because his website is indianjapanese.com and it’s the running theme through his set.
The NASABA conference left me with the warm fuzzies. Thinking back to all those fake South Asian conferences many of us attended when we were younger, its pleasant to see that our peers went on to become adults who are trying to make a positive change by getting involved in movements that matter. They are all legit now. That, in fact, was one of the best points to take home from NASABA. No matter what your day job is, GET INVOLVED. Network. Do something more than the minimum that is required of you to coast on. It made me want to leave in the middle of the banquet and start a South Asian Aerospace Engineers Association.
Next year the NASABA conference moves to Atlanta. I’d love another press pass.
Special thanks to the conference organizers, Rudhir Patel, Sona Pancholy, Seema Kakade, Akil Vohra, and Vijay Bondada.
I’ll bite: what do the Republicans have to offer the South Asian community, other than tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts?
What was on Teppara’s hand-out?
Yet-unfulfilled promises to reform the current state of medical malpractice?
What do they have to offer?
I don’t know…
Maybe an actual defense against Islamofacists intent on slaughtering every infidel and wiping out western civilization…
Oh, so they’ve moved against the militants in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? That country they invaded doesn’t look like either.
The keynote speaker at the evening banquet (who was an older, second or third generation prosecutor from Vancouver where there is a lot of brown on brown violence) had the most memorable quote of the night. “You aren’t a true lawyer until you’ve had to defend a Punjabi.”
That would be Wally Oppal He’s now BC’s attorney-general (since June 16) and sat on BCs highest court before that. He’s also taken a lead role in addressing the epidemic of Desi (mostly Punjabi Sikh) gang violence in Vancouver.
I ran into a friend of mine at the one thing I briefly stopped in on at the NASABA conference who said that most of the attendees were corporate lawyers who were being covered by their firms, not leftis advocates (Digression: I’m not sure I should any longer refer to her as a friend since she essentially said I looked like a vagrant. You try getting off the Chinatown bus and looking fly). By my definition of “public interest”–not the bizarre lawyer one that makes prosecutors eligible for public interest awards, if she was right, I don’t think most of the attendees qualify. But I wasn’t there for more than 5 minutes and you were, Abhi 🙂
As for the Republicans having something to offer South Asians. I’m not going to make the argument for them because I think it’s counterproductive to encourage people to join the Republicans, but let’s be real about immense variation in our desi communities and in particular the class divide and gender relations in the desi communities. Of course, at this point, you can be fairly economically and socially conservative and a Democrat and still feel good about yourself for being on the right side, so I strongly encourage overprivileged desis to do that instead for as long as they can bear it 🙂
“I briefly stopped in on at the NASABA conference who said that most of the attendees were corporate lawyers who were being covered by their firms, not leftis advocates”
That isn’t true, and besides even the “corporate lawyers who were being covered by their firms” tend to be left of center in their politics. Many public interest lawyers (including the non-prosecutors) begin their legal career at firms (usually to pay off debt)and within the legal community this is not looked down upon as it seems to be in the tone of your email. I also do not think just because someone is working for a corporate law firm that means they are a Republican. That is really simplifying things too much – salary does not always correlate to politics – many of the Red-staters are not as well off as the people on the coasts…
I’ll bite: what do the Republicans have to offer the South Asian community, other than tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts?
Amardeep, I can’t remember the specifics. I borrowed a pen from a friend to take notes and then promptly lost my notes at the hotel bar. Much of Teppara’s literature showed an electoral map of the U.S. (how red it was). I do remember very clearly however that Khan said he became a Republican because of two local issues. “Rent control” and “affirmative action,” both of which he disagreed with. He mentioned that having rent control to keep rents low was disadvantageous for poor people and he wanted to so something about it.
That would be Wally Oppal He’s now BC’s attorney-general (since June 16) and sat on BCs highest court before that.
That’s right Ikram. Thanks for supplying the name. I just couldn’t remember it.
SR, I was specifically addressing Abhi’s point, which was the idea that NASABA’s membership is public interest and therefore “[leans] heavily to the left.”
As for people who do corporate legal work–I recognize that there are some people who do it strictly out of necessity (although we can get into another argument about people who make a conscious choice to accumulate several hundred thousand dollars in debt and then argue “necessity” as an out). I would guess, though, that a more typical profile of someone in corporate work is someone who has been to college, doesn’t know what they want to do with themselves or has weird ideas about helping people thorugh the law, a year or two out of college chooses to go to law school, accumulates a huge amount of debt and quickly abandons their ideas about spending most of their time helping people, gets sucked into legal culture and indoctrinated by legal education and stops believing in community lawyering, and finally becomes convinced it’s “liberal” to aspire to make $500,000 a year or prosecute people as long as you vote Democratic and give some money and spend a fraction of your time cherrypicking the pro bono work that’s politically easiest to stomach (“oh, we don’t represent detainees–only people seeking asylum”). And that’s how we end up with 950,000 lawyers in the United States.
A lot of the lawyers I’ve met (not all–but a lot) are argumentative, arrogant, narrow-minded, unable to see beyond a legal lens unless really prodded (and even then, quickly retreat back into the intellectual void whence their thinking comes), and generally don’t do nearly as much to further improving conditions for disempowered people as they could if they wanted to. I can be accused of sharing a lot of those traits–but at least I don’t spend my time doing litigation for pharmaceutical companies or living the idea that the legal system (including the education that lawyers get) is good or even okay and needs to be perpetuated as is with minor modifications rather than drastically reformed.
saurav, your first paragraph of criticisms of the legal field has some validity but you simply dissolve into a rant that spews generalizations left and right in your second paragraph. as a lawyer myself, i do share some frustrations with my profession but i strongly disagree with the idea that south asians in law are somehow morally reprehensible assholes with no ability to formulate coherent arguments. are south asians in medecine, finance, politics, non-profit work, academia, and all the other diverse fields that our diverse population is part of somehow fantastically more morally upright and informed than the lawyers? don’t hate your fellow south asian brothers and sisters just to make yourself feel better about what you do. that, my friend, will not help you build the “community” that you seem to care about.
please don’t take my misspelling of medicine as an indication of how idiotic lawyers are!
Saurav – a lot of asylum seekers are detainees and we law firm types represent the detained ones too. Oh and a lot of us also represent people appealing the death penalty (who, in case you did not know, are detained), domestic violence victims, and people accused of being terrorists. So before you make sweeping judgmental statements, check your facts.
And being a prosecutor does serve the public interest because in case you did not know the justice system requires 2 sides to make arguments. And the way you talk about it, no true liberal would ever become a prosecutor. Well that would really serve our justice system well – to only have conservatives as prosecutors. You have a very high-school like, immature, un-nuanced view of the world – a kind of reverse on Bush’s you’re either with us or with them. According to your rhetoric you can only “liberal” if you make no money. What is it exactly that you do that allows you to sit on such a high horse?
Okay, this is getting out of hand, and I’ll take responsibility for that for taking the tone that I did. I think it’s fair, too, to say that I could have been a little more nuanced 🙂
This was a post about lawyers and I was responding to someone else’s comment about lawyers; I’ll let someone with the same experience in other fields voice their complaints about those fields; it’s not my place.
There were no specific references to South Asians in what I said (although I have no illusions about the lawyers among them somehow fully escaping the education and culture of legaldom in a way that nondesis do not). Even so, I would rather criticize my “fellow south asian brothers and sisters” where I disagree with them than suppress those disagreements (even if I’m not always the most diplomatic person about it). Most of them can handle it or will write me off 🙂 And if they can’t, well, I’d rather build community with people who share my values (not beliefs…values) than people who don’t–regardless of skin color.
Some of my best friends are lawyers 😉 And I will probably end up marrying one (just conjecture) because they seem to be the only people I meet. And I may eventually become a lawyer, if I think it would be worthwhile in my personal growth, or I decide to become one of those people that I’m critiquing because I want to make a lot of money or please my family or accumulate status–but I hope I’ll try to be a little more up front about it and my reasons for doing it (and actually have reasons) if that’s what I decide to do. More pertinently, many people I know are going to law school and (i hope) are going to become a different type of lawyer than the ones I was caricaturing above.
I never said that lawyers are “reprehensible assholes”, although if that’s the conclusion you want to draw from the list of adjectives I threw out there, feel free; that’s your opinion. I know perfectly decent people that are argumentative, arrogant, and limited in their understanding of the world by their professional educations, and generally don’t do nearly as much to further improving conditions for disempowered people as they could if they wanted to. I am one of them. So is my psychopharmacologist (well he’s not really argumentative).
If I had been a little more diplomatic, what I would have said was that many I’ve met tend to have an overinflated sense of the role of legal work in promoting social justice and frequently lack or choose not to employ a capacity to look at issues through multiple lenses. Of course they can put together coherent arguments–that’s part of the problem–a lot of the folks I’ve met can put together coherent arguments about something without really understanding (or trying to understand) the substance of it.
🙂
Uh huh. Right. I worked as a policy person/caseworker/media advocate/organizer at a legal organization on “post 9-11 issues” for about a year and a half and the people who had the skills to work on detention/deportation issues and would actually commit to taking them on were, most of the time, other lawyers at public interest organizations. But most of the detainees simply went unrepresented or represented by $hitty lawyers that they paid too much money to.
No kidding. I think that this type of work is great if it’s part of a political campaign to draw attention to the issue, to build capacity of grassroots organizations working on these issues, and otherwise facilitates movement building and combats the ideas that led to the end result of someone being on death row or being deported for being accused of being a terrorist. Nowhere did I say that lawyers don’t have a role to play; just that there are too many lawyers doing work from a legal perspective and not enough people doing other things. And that’s among the people that bother to care–the corporate lawyers are a different breed altogether.
This is the kind of narrowmindedness I was talking about. Maybe in 20 years, when the justice system has had some significant revisions due to largescale social change that eliminates some of the racism and xenophobia that are in it, you might have a point. For now, though, being a cog in the War on Drugs or War on Terror and facilitating the increase of the prison population in the country with the largest prison is far less valuable, than, say, meeting with people and communities who are targeted by these strategies and working to build power in them. Or performing some other function that helps facilitate that.
I think George Soros does wonderful work with his privilege (more so than I do). It would be great if other people who have made that much money were willing to have as intelligent an analysis and devote as many of their resources facilitating social change in the system that they are or have been benefiting from. What I’m critiquing is not the fact of making money, but the mentalities and attitudes that I think people naturally tend to adopt as they get more and more privilege (and I’m speaking from personal experience as someone who grew up uppermiddle class). More often than not, wealthy, “straight”, male, U.S., South Asian citizens are probably going to have attitudes that aim at preserving the social system as is than they will attitudes that try and substantially reform it. Hope I’m wrong–please point me to some surveys that show me as such.
Nothing.
the characterization that most members of nasaba are in public interest is wrong. most of the members of nasaba are members of large prestigious law firm. very few will be in public interest beyond moving into goverment work or politics. this is true for most of the minority bars.
many of its members work in the public interest and immigrant rights sectors
If NASABA is full of public interest lawyers, they sure must know a slamming tailor in the motherland, b/c they sure dress really well for folks non-market wages.
Though I guess some folks consider Dept. of Justice gigs “public interest” too…
Saurav:
While I agree with you on one hand, I must submit that doing prosecution is working in the public’s interest. Yes, you are right. Their end is putting people in jail, seeking the death penalty, and adhereing to legislative policies (like 3 Strike laws). However, they are doing their jobs and we NEED more public interest minded people with the spirit of grassroots organization, understanding the system, etc. working inside the government.
I had the same mentality as you until I saw the workload my friends had in DA’s offices. Not an excuse, but the reality is that prosecutors are STRAPPED for time, money, and resources. Most don’t even have a properly working internet. It’s pointless to think that our justice system will ever be really fair. But, I think it’s also narrow minded to think that going into prosecutorial work is not public interest. They are working to get rapists, child molesters, and drug dealers off the street. And to me, that is a public interest.
I would rather you go at the lobbyists for prison construction, financiers of prisons/juvenile halls, politicians giving them tax breaks, and proponents of cutting back on education IN jail. Those are the REAL culprits of our failing justice system.
I attended the conference and thought it was very well organized and extremely informative. As for the keynote, Justice Oppal was TERRIBLE and several of his comments were OUT OF LINE (including the comment about not being a lawyer until you have defended a Punjabi). Someone should have screened his speech. The person who won the Public Interest award was much more inspiring.
Abhi, come on. You can’t take your own words out of context.
Your whole point was that the NASABA membership was left-leaning and you attributed that to the idea that some sort of public interest and immigrant rights influence. Subsequent conversations I’ve had with desi public interest attorneys has told me that’s totally wrong. Even if you’re not saying that “most” or “all” NASABA members are public interest or immigrant rights focused, you were arguing that that kind of work has a substantial influence on the organization, which, again, by the hearsay of people I’ve spoken to, is just blatantly wrong (again, by the hearsay).
There’s no shame in a correction 🙂
Btw, a much simpler explanation is that most of the people in attendance were democrats (as trial lawyesr and most people with higher education tend to be) and at least marginally politically conscious, and therefore have a problem with Bobby Jindal and other Republicans. But that’s just conjecture on my part.
Why?
I saw my former boss, who represented people in detention, get a public interest award followed immediately by someone from the immigration service; so you’ll forgive me if I’m a little cynical about the ethical values of the law profession.
My problem is with the ethics of the law profession, which defines “public interest” as anything that upholds the American system of law–which I don’t consider inherently moral (and am willing to entertain arguments that it’s inherently immoral in some/many respects). I don’t think someone who sends nonviolent drug offenders to jail or facilitates the deportation of people by explicitly seeking prosecution on crimes that are deportable or seeks the death penalty is doing any service to the public. They’re just a spoke in the wheel, at best. At worst, they’re malicious or politically opportunistic.
The one person that’s done the most to change my mind about these issues is Eliot Spitzer, because of what he’s done as the attorney general of New York in actually working for the public interest. But he’s a rare bird; most prosecutors seem intent to be “tough on crime” and all that nonsense. Maybe in 20 years, like I said, the justice system will be reforme enough that a bourgie liberal like me can be sort of okay with it.
I wasn’t going after prosecutors as a primary target–just saying that they don’t work in the service of the public–they work in the service of the legal system which is currently not working in the service of the public. Of course, they could be a little more courageous and use a lot more discretion than they do, but we’ll have to pressure them into it. Regardless, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try to call to account the others you point to who are leading the drive towards less democracy and more abuses in the U.S.
By the way, I wonder if the justice system is not failing as much as just playing out the intrinsic conservatism of legal thinking (which primarily relies on exegesis and not problem solving as far as I can tell) and deferring to the wishes of the political classes, even when they misserve the public. It seems wildly succsesful at having jailed more people per capita than any other country in the world.
Any hot chicks at the convention?