In many respects, Milwaukee attorney Robert Habush's career has been incredibly successful.
Habush has represented clients in some of the most high-profile lawsuits in Wisconsin history - from the collapse of the crane that killed workers building Miller Park to suits against Big Tobacco.
Habush’s career – and his personal story - are the subject of a new biography, titled Courtroom Avenger: The Challenges and Triumphs of Robert Habush, by Milwaukee writer Kurt Chandler.
Habush grew up in Whitefish Bay, a predominately white community that was roughly 60 percent Roman Catholic. From childhood all the way to till the end of high school, life forHabush, who is Jewish, was incredibly hard. He was relentlessly bullied and labeled an outcast from children in the community.
That feeling of unfairness and anger towards his oppressors carried on with him through adulthood. "I'd call it an evolving chip on my shoulder, just getting bigger and bigger and bigger,"Habush explains.
"It turned out that the career gave me a way to vent this anger," he explains. "I might have gone totally crazy if I didn't have this way to vent all this anger and it also gave me a classic case of empathy."
However, throughout all the success that he and his firm have had, Habush is still well aware that injustice will never find an end. "It gets to me in a way that it just provides more fuel for my career," he says. "That's why I'm still going at age 79. I don't know when to quit."
