Legal News

IJM: ?Prayers Help. Prayers and a Lawyer Help More?

By Dan Slater

Wanted: Lawyers needed to travel the world, enforce biblical injunction to “seek justice, protect the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Work with local law enforcers to advocate on behalf of bonded laborers, child prostitutes, the falsely accused. Christianity a plus.

OK, so the above is not a real job ad. But it might approximate what Gary Haugen, the founder of the International Justice Mission, would write if he needed to staff up in any of the 12 countries where his organization currently does business. Haugen (Harvard, U. of Chicago Law) is a 45 year-old evangelical Christian who recognizes the inequities of the U.S. justice system, but discovered that he could achieve more by working abroad.

In this week’s issue of the New Yorker (click here), Haugen (pictured) says that the four billion people who live in places with a dysfunctional justice system “don’t get a sleepy lawyer or a crummy lawyer — they get nada.” He says:

The colonial powers who built justice systems in the Third World never intended to serve these people. Colonial justice was designed to control these people. Then, in the nineteen-sixties, the colonial powers left, and the justice systems stayed. Nobody, when we started international development, said, ‘Let’s revamp the public justice system. Let’s go into these places, where you either have colonial or pre-modern systems of justice, and bring to bear what we’ve learned about due process.’ No, that part was skipped. . . The people who care about injustice don’t tend to spend a lot of time in courtrooms or police stations. We tend to use words like ‘corrupt’ and give up on these places.

At a hearing for a wrongly accused Kenyan man whose case had been taken on by an IJM lawyer in Nairobi, Haugen says: “Prayers help. Prayers and a lawyer help more.”

Sounds like an organization you’d like to work for? At the organization’s headquarters in Crystal City, Va., each day begins by assembling for thirty minutes of silence and “prayerful preparation.” Even Christians who have come to the mission from more secular jobs find the adjustment difficult, reports the New Yorker. Holly Burkhalter, a Human Rights Watch veteran who joined the IJM in 2006, says: “It was one thing for us to pray for the client who had H.I.V., but another thing to pray for the person trying to find new office furniture. I thought God had better things to do than help us find office furniture. But I trusted that Gary knew what he was doing.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 12, 2009 (boomark / email).