Immigrant of the Day: Lam Ho (Viet Nam)

Harvard Law Student Lam Ho, who will graduate this June, was 6 years old when he and his family emigrated from Vietnam to Brockton, Massachusetts, where his parents worked on assembly lines and the family ate in soup kitchens and wore hand-me-down clothes.  Ho’s home was marked by domestic violence. When he was 8 years old, his parents divorced and he went to live with his paternal grandparents and extended family.  Ho attended Brockton High School, the largest high school in New England, and Ho says he was its first openly gay student.   He graduated first in his class, had the highest SAT scores, and headed to Brown University. It was through these difficult experiences that Ho resolved to dedicate himself to helping people, especially children and battered women.  Through high school, college and a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford, Ho founded or worked for organizations for low-income and disenfranchised people. At Brown, where he simultaneously earned undergraduate and master’s degrees, he managed several community service organizations while working at least 35 hours a week in odd jobs to support himself and help his mother. At Harvard, Ho spends 60 to 90 hours each week on two clinical placements: He is president of the Legal Aid Bureau — really a full time job and once held by the current Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick (Harvard ’82) — and also co-supervisor at Reaching Out About Depression (ROAD), a community organization for low-income women affected by mental health problems. At HLS, Ho also founded and directs the Giving Tree to solicit Christmas gifts for children in need, in recognition of his extraordinary commitment to public interest, Ho was named a recipient of the 13th annual PSLawNet Pro Bono Publico Award. Ho plans to devote his life to poverty law, impact litigation and community organizing. In December, Ho learned he was one of six Harvard law students to receive a Skadden Fellowship for 2007, which will support him as he works on his next ambitious project: He is moving to Chicago to establish a community legal clinic for children and families.

For more on this inspirational story, click here. Thanks to Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports for bringing Lam Ho to my attention.

KJ