Raymond M. Brown's trial practice has taken him from New Jersey courtrooms to international criminal proceedings. A partner at Pashman Stein Walder Hayden, he handles criminal defense, internal investigations and commercial disputes. His cases have included the nine-month trial involving former U.S. Secretary of Labor Raymond J. Donovan and the defense of corporate executives facing environmental charges. He has also represented victims of the Darfur genocide before the International Criminal Court.
Brown earned his bachelor's degree at Columbia in 1969 and his law degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974. While a Columbia student, he participated in the campus occupation of 1968. He later contributed to A Time to Stir, a collection of participants' accounts of those protests. His early legal work was alongside his father, Raymond A. Brown, a New Jersey trial lawyer and civil-rights activist.
With his wife, attorney Wanda Akin, Brown co-founded the International Justice Project. His international work has included representing people affected by the Darfur conflict and defending an accused person before the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Those assignments placed him on different sides of international criminal proceedings: advocating for victims and providing a defense to someone facing prosecution. His investigative work has also taken him to East Africa, El Salvador, Switzerland and Sierra Leone.
Brown has worked on questions of fairness within New Jersey's criminal courts. In 2021, he represented an amicus curiae before the state Supreme Court in State v. Andujar, a case addressing racial bias in jury selection. Alongside practice, he taught at Seton Hall Law School from 2000 to 2013. He began co-hosting the legal-affairs television program Due Process with journalist Sandra King in 1996.
His recent work includes the defense of Paterson Councilman Michael Jackson in an election-fraud prosecution. In May 2026, Brown's firm reported that he, Dillon J. McGuire and Chelsea J. Nkrumah had obtained dismissal of the indictment, ending a prosecution that had lasted six years.
