ABA’s First Hispanic-American President Seeks to Preserve Justice System, Make Civics a Priority

abajournal.com
Posted Aug 9, 2010 7:03 PM CDT
By Edward A. Adams

Florida attorney Stephen N. Zack has become the first Hispanic American to head the world’s largest voluntary professional association. He is the administrative partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner’s Miami office. His one-year term as ABA President officially begins Tuesday, at the conclusion of the annual meeting.
Zack, the son of a Cuban mother and a father whose roots were in Russia, is fluent in Spanish and spent his childhood in Cuba. His family fled the Castro regime and settled in Miami.
“As a 14-year-old in 1961, when I was fleeing Cuba with my family, and we were taken off a plane by the G2—the Cuban equivalent of the KGB—and put in a cell, the last thing I could have imagined was a day like today,” Zack told the ABA’s 561-member House of Delegates.
Zack outlined four priorities for his one-year term. First is the preservation of the justice system. “When I was 14 in Cuba, the first knowledge we had that we would lose our liberty was the attacks on the judiciary," he said. "We today are under the same attack against our justice system. We are fighting to establish the rule of law around the world, and we are in danger of losing it here in the United States.”

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