Lawyers can be social engineers

“A lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society.”

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As a young lawyer, these sage words by Charles Hamilton Houston serve as a daily reminder of my capacity to either help or harm communities.

Evidence of this reality is written all throughout history.

Years before he was a Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case which declared segregation in schools illegal. Immediately after segregation was struck down, a different lawyer, Attorney General John N. Mitchell, used his power to stall desegregation in the South.

Marshall and Mitchell’s respective roles in history illustrate how lawyers can serve to either build new systems or uphold the status quo.

I have seen this power struggle first hand. For the past year, I worked as a staff attorney at Al Otro Lado, thanks to a fellowship I received from ChangeLawyers. Al Otro Lado is a legal service organization at the US-Mexico border serving deportees, refugees, and separated families.

Facing everything from death threats, kidnapping, and extortion, to beatings and assaults, my clients fled the only homes they knew seeking refuge in what they believed to be the land of opportunity. What they got instead, was a jail cell in a…