One of the happiest tasks I have each year is choosing the Equal Justice Works fellow whom ALM sponsors. For the last 10 years we’ve funded these efforts with proceeds from the annual American Lawyer Awards dinner. It’s a concrete way for us to act on our belief that the rule of law is essential to both our nation and our business. By funding an EJW fellow we help extend legal services to people who otherwise couldn’t afford them. This year we selected Mark Doss, a Georgetown Law graduate who just finished a federal district court clerkship. Doss will work at the Iraq Refugee Assistance Project in New York’s Urban Justice Center where he will address an insidious problem: domestic violence in Middle Eastern immigrant families.
Along with aging chemical weapons hidden in the desert, a new breed of enemies on the Syrian border, and a shaky government in Baghdad, the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq left behind another unintended consequence: a horrendous refugee problem. Some of the more than one million Iraqis who fled for their lives were merely unlucky souls, caught up in the inevitable reverberations of war. Others became targets because their neighbors didn’t like the cut of their religious or political beliefs, or their history of working with Americans. Many remain displaced; about 85,000 have been granted asylum in the U.S. since 2007.
