Del. Sam Rasoul achieved a goal Friday that few knew he had been working on for the past four and a half years: The Roanoke lawmaker became a licensed lawyer.
Rasoul, who has represented Roanoke in the General Assembly’s House of Delegates since 2014, quietly began attending law school in 2022. He graduated in May from a part-time, year-round hybrid program administered by the University of Dayton in Ohio. He took the bar exam in July, and his name appeared on the list of newly licensed lawyers from the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners on Friday.
“I just found out about an hour ago,” he said when contacted by a Cardinal News reporter Friday afternoon. “Hardly anybody knows I was in law school because I’ve always been taking extra classes in something.
“It took me about four and a half months of studying at the tail end and then after law school, so that was quite intense for me and the family, in addition to my consulting work and legislating,” he added.
The process of obtaining his law license has informed his work in Richmond, Rasoul said. He added that he felt legislators who do not already practice law would benefit from a week’s worth of basic law school to provide a working knowledge of how Virginia law functions. The process has given him a new appreciation for the power of law, he said.
Rasoul said he hopes to focus his practice on civil rights and criminal defense, though he has not made any immediate career moves. Rasoul is a consultant for nonprofit organizations as well as a member of the General Assembly.
“I’ve spoken with a number of attorneys and am still marinating on things, but I think one thing is clear: In today’s environment I’ve definitely grown a passion for civil rights given all that’s been happening in our communities,” he said.
He said that witnessing the infringement of First Amendment rights and an increasing lack of due process and constitutional protections and hearing people worry about the future of the country are his motivating factors.
“Our founders wanted us to have three co-equal branches [of government], and as the days pass, it seems as though that’s tougher and tougher, but at a basic level, I just want to make sure people’s rights are being respected,” he said.
