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Richard J. Lewandowski

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//May 25, 2009//

Richard J. Lewandowski

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//May 25, 2009//

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Richard Lewandowski
Richard Lewandowski

In the early 1980s, on the heels of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Richard “Rick” Lewandowski took a college tour through China.

“I remember seeing donkey carts pulling pre-fab concrete slabs to construction sites. And I thought, ‘That’s hard work.’ Then I saw men pulling those carts,” said Lewandowski, 55, of Madison.

The Third World atmosphere had melted away by the time Lewandowski returned to China in the 1990s. The seeds of capitalism, he thought, had begun to take root.

Mementos of those trips — a picture with two monks outside a Tibetan monastery, and a “drop-dead amazing” snapshot of a sunrise over the Tsangpo River — are in Lewandowski’s office at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek S.C. in Madison.

To his surprise, the firm not only encouraged him to attend a pro bono immigration law seminar in Chicago, but also backed him — even volunteered a summer law clerk to help — when he took a case last year representing a 17-year-old Tibetan seeking political asylum in the United States.

Nima was arrested when he was 16 for trying to get out of China to see the Dalai Lama.
Nima spent six months in hard farm labor, where he was regularly beaten and shocked with electricity, before escaping over a river, on a rope bridge, from China to Nepal, where he caught a bus to India.

Nima spent six months with a family in Delhi, before seeing the Dalai Lama.

After two weeks in worship, he caught a flight, without any passport or identification papers, to Los Angeles.

“I really did treat this as the equivalent of a death penalty case,” Lewandowski said. “If he went back as a repeat violator for having escaped, the punishment would have been long and very severe. Few people survive it.”

The case sped through federal court — many immigration cases can easily last more than a year; this one took two months, partly because Nima was a juvenile in custody, partly because of lucky timing — and left Lewandowski with a new understanding of everything from the lunar calendar to the intricacies of immigration law.

The experience also left Lewandowski with a new connection to China and a growing passion to help the people there.

“I’d like to free Tibet one Tibetan at a time, but it’s going to take a while,” Lewandowski said.
He’s already gotten a jumpstart.

Lewandowski has taken another Tibetan case, this time representing a nun accused of helping Dalai Lama loyalists. A hearing is set for next summer.

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