Zack Understands Legal Concerns, Language of Hispanic Community #ABAChicago
Stephen Zack. Photo by REP3
It was just one moment in a hallway outside another hotel meeting room, but it offered a telling glimpse into the impact Stephen N. Zack is likely to have when he takes his turn as ABA president.
He was giving an interview to a television crew on Friday morning during the ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago. The crew was from the Telemundo, a Spanish-language television network, and Zack was comfortably doing the interview in Spanish.
Zack is fluent in Spanish because it is a language of his childhood. He grew up in Cuba, the son of a Cuban mother and a father whose roots were in Russia. Zack’s family fled the Castro regime in 1961, when he was a teenager, and settled in Miami.
Zack, a partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner in Miami, will become the ABA’s first Hispanic-American president a year from now, at the close of the 2010 Annual Meeting. But first he must go through the formality of a vote by the House of Delegates on Tuesday that will make him president-elect. He will serve in that post until he becomes president. ABA presidents serve one-year terms.
In an interview with the ABA Journal, Zack said his background will help bolster the ABA’s outreach to a growing minority community that is starting to flex its political and economic muscle and also has many serious legal concerns.
In 2000, Hispanics made up 12.6 percent of this country’s population (but only 3.4 percent of the lawyer population), according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2050, the Census Bureau projects that Hispanics will make up a quarter of the population.
“The Hispanic community is the largest and fastest-growing immigrant group in our country,” Zack said, “and the ABA has not traditionally focused on that community’s issues. To have a Hispanic-American president who has lived through the immigrant experience says, ‘We know you’re there, and we will be part of the solution of your problems.’ “
Zack said he plans to appoint a commission that will work with other groups to address legal issues facing the Hispanic community. Among those concerns are immigration, voting rights, access to interpreters and other language assistance in the courts, and juvenile justice services.
Zack’s interview with the Telemundo crew covered the ongoing problem of fraud by notarios, who often hold themselves out in Hispanic communities as experts on immigration laws and procedures even though they have minimal training and expertise. Many immigrants assume that notarios in the United States have the same formal status that they do in most Latin American countries. The ABA Commission on Immigration has stepped up efforts to address the problem in conjunction with individual lawyers and other immigration rights groups.
“It’s an issue that’s been under the radar for a long time—too long,” Zack said.
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ABA Journal’s Annual Meeting coverage at this link.
Flickr Slideshow: ABA Journal snapshots from Annual Meeting.
Interactive updates on the Annual Meeting from ABA Media Relations at ABANow.org.
