About John Walter
John Walter Lawit has spent more than four decades working in immigration law, moving between practice, adjudication and teaching. He earned a B.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1972 and a J.D. from the University of New Hampshire School of Law in 1977. Those academic years set a clear path toward immigration and nationality matters early in his career.
He established his private practice, John W. Lawit, LLC, in 1979 and has served as its founder and senior lawyer since then. Before that, he built experience in community and nonprofit settings, including instructing staff at Catholic Social Services in 1989. In 1985 he accepted an appointment as a United States immigration judge for the Department of Justice, a role that placed him on the bench for removal and immigration hearings and gave him direct exposure to the federal adjudicatory process.
Teaching has been part of his professional life for decades. He taught immigration and nationality law as an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1983 and returned to academia in 2014 as an adjunct at Texas Tech School of Law. Those faculty posts ran alongside his practice and public service, and they reflect a steady thread of training other lawyers and advocates in the mechanics of immigration law.
Lawit holds memberships across multiple jurisdictions. He is active in the State Bar of Texas and has been listed there since 1990. He also maintains ties to the State Bar of New Mexico’s Immigration Law Section and reports membership in the Dallas Bar Association’s Immigration Section, where he is recorded as a founder of the section. His volunteer work includes serving as a lawyer for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee since 1981, and he also lists membership in the Canadian Bar Association.
The arc of his career shows movement between adjudication, classroom and private counsel. He has handled matters from administrative hearings to client representation and has taught others how those systems operate. He continues to lead his namesake firm, handling immigration matters and related administrative work, and he maintains memberships in multiple state and professional bar groups.
He is actively practicing at John W. Lawit, LLC, focusing on immigration law and related administrative proceedings.
