Are lawyers social engineers or social parasites?

The Civil Rights Era was a period of great progress in American history led by lawyers, like Charles Hamilton Houston, who used their knowledge of the law to address the gross inequality and discrimination that plagued American society. Mr. Houston once said that “lawyers are either social engineers or parasites on their society,” and his use of such strong language was an expression of the urgent battle that was taking place for equality at the time. Pakistan’s minorities are experiencing a similar tumultuous period, and the lawyers of the nation include both social engineers and parasites. This is a fact one must remember before they make statements assessing the credibility or ideology of the “Lawyers” or “Judiciary” overall.

Before delving into this analogy, I suggest that a ‘parasite’ is not intended as a derogatory term for the conservative cadre of lawyers in discriminatory societies who wish to maintain the status quo. Nature has provided parasites in almost every ecosystem, and any damage done by the organism isn’t done with malice, but is merely a characteristic of the parasite. Namely, since the parasite feeds off the body it is attached to, political or otherwise, it weakens it from striving and evolving with the environment.

Parasites are especially dangerous for when a political body is undergoing stress, and it can be argued that Pakistan is certainly in such a position. When looked at the pattern discrimination against religious minorities, like Ahmedis and Shias, ethnic minorities like Balochis or Pashtuns, or women, it is clear that Pakistan’s political body is in a crisis state. Yet, while such crude injustice takes place violating the central precepts of equality protected by the constitution, there are those lawyers who use the law to continue these discriminatory practices.

In the last month, lawyers have created mob scenes and threatened the life of a judge, all due to the death verdict for Mumtaz Qadri, the self-confessed assassin of Salman Taseer. Governor Taseer was brutally slain because he had the courage to publicly state that a blasphemy law was being used to discriminate against religious minorities. His act of compassion was met with heinous violence, by a man who now receives support as a religious warrior from the parasitic lawyers of Pakistan’s society.

The US witnessed the same kind of cold-hearted behavior by lawyers who wished to continue a brutal system of discrimination against African-Americans. In the Southern states, leaders of the white community would terrorise or publicly hang innocent African Americans. There were lawyers who were ready to defend such hateful and racist acts in court based on their ideals of white superiority, just as lawyers in Pakistan are willing to defend a murder based on their own chauvinistic religious beliefs.

In Pakistan, the lawyers supporting Qadri are not denying that he committed the act, but that he was justified in doing so because the victim had “insulted the blasphemy law” by critiquing it. Such a faulty defense not only displays a lack of legal logic, but it attempts to silence any future debate on amending or appealing the blasphemy law. The lawyers are sending a clear message to the rest of society that anyone who speaks in favor of religious tolerance will face a bloody end and their killer should be rewarded, not punished. So, while Qadri may have killed one voice of dissent, his parasitic lawyers are attempting to murder all future voices of tolerance calling for improved rights for minorities.

Just Pakistan’s religious minorities have been treated as second-class citizens, African-Americans in the US suffered many injustices that were carried out by lawyer-parasites as well. When the US Supreme Court held in 1876 that African Americans were to live “separate but equal,” from whites, lawyers helped to write Jim Crow laws across the country. Some examples of Jim Crow laws were that African Americans could not be served food in the same room of a restaurant as Whites, they were required to use separate water fountains and bathrooms, and they could be banned from serving on a jury or voting. And just as there are supporters of the discriminatory standards placed on minorities in Pakistan’s courts, there were lawyers in America who championed this unjust hateful system of Jim Crow.

Therefore, if there were ever a time when Pakistan needed “social engineers” it would be now. And though there were an innumerable amount of parasitic lawyers who continued the injustices of racism in America, there was also a group who stood up and was able to alter the system completely.

Such hope exists in Pakistan through people like Asma Jahangir and Aitizaz Ahsan, who seem to understand the crisis state the nation’s minorities are in. Therefore, one must be careful in delineating what they mean when they claim support or distaste for the ‘lawyers movement’ or ‘judiciary,’ as it includes both social engineers and social parasites.

The writer holds a Juris Doctorate in the US and is a researcher on comparative law and international law issues.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.