Two decades ago, profoundly disenchanted by the media’s utter failure to hold the George W Bush administration accountable for the deception and fecklessness of the Iraq War, I abandoned a life-long dream of becoming a journalist. I had decided I’d rather be an advocate than an enabler. The path to advocacy was an obvious and well-trod one: I enrolled in law school.
The stories we told ourselves as lawyers were heroic. I went to NYU Law, a school with a robust public interest program and legal clinics dedicated to defending civil liberties, immigrants, and those on death row. We valorised lawyers who had changed the country for the better, from Thurgood Marshall (whose arguments in Brown vs Board of Education ended the era of legally sanctioned school segregation in America, and who went on to serve on the Supreme Court) to feminist trailblazer turned Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Bryan Stevenson, the famous death row litigator who was on NYU Law’s faculty. As far as I could tell, my fellow students and I took our burgeoning duties as lawyers quite seriously. We debated the merits of complex criminal and constitutional law cases, including (and especially) those that challenged our politics and our ideals; we practised defending or at least articulating positions we may not agree with; we learned to build arguments and cases based on precedent over preference or personal morality. Law school doesn’t really teach you how to be a lawyer, but it certainly teaches you how to think like a lawyer. And part of that was imparting a series of core values: we may not all agree on the exact same interpretation of the constitution, but we do agree that it governs; we may not agree on whether someone accused of a crime is good or bad or guilty or innocent, but we do agree that no matter who they are, they deserve a vigorous defence; we understand that our profession is key to the basic functioning of American democracy and society.
These were lofty ideals. And it turns out that for a lot of lawyers, they were self-serving fairy tales.
Watching some the supposedly biggest and baddest law firms in the US swiftly cave to Donald Trump out of financial self-interest has been one of the most revolting experiences of the last few months, a brief period that has been chockfull of the revolting. Add to that the universities, many with renowned law schools, that are not standing up for students who are being nabbed by immigration officials, the individual lawyers working on behalf of this administration’s assault on the constitution, as well as the judges who are either too cowardly to fully stand up to the president or – worse – actually invested in his undemocratic aims, and the Trump regime has revealed much of the American legal profession to be shockingly hollow.
Trump has done irreparable damage to the world. His administration has cut off aid to the world’s neediest. They have sent global economies into a tailspin. They have deported people without due process of law, including many who were convicted of no crimes and others whose only wrongdoing was political speech this administration doesn’t like. They are currently refusing to comply with a Supreme Court order to bring back a man they mistakenly deported to an El Salvadoran prison simply, it seems, to make the point that they believe themselves to be above the law of the highest court in the land.
And what are the lawyers doing as this administration defies the law? Pledging hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services to the White House.
As part of the Trump administration’s attack on its perceived enemies, the president signed executive orders targeting law firms he believes are hostile to him and his interests or are tied to Democrats in some way, essentially making it nearly impossible for them to represent any clients with government dealings. That’s a lot of clients. While some firms are fighting back, others are folding faster than an envelope-stuffing paralegal. Paul Weiss, once the home of storied litigator Roberta Kaplan (who won a major marriage equality case before the Supreme Court and represented E Jean Carroll in her successful defamation and sexual abuse lawsuit against Trump), has pledged $40m in legal services “to support the administration’s initiatives”. Skadden pledged $100m, and so did Cadwalader. Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman and Simpson Thacher each pledged $125m. So far, the administration has racked up nearly $1bn in promised free legal work from the country’s most prestigious firms.
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The idea is that if these firms work for the administration and its various conservative causes for free, maybe the administration won’t issue executive orders making it impossible for them to do their jobs. These firms understandably want to financially survive. But instead of standing on even the tiniest shred of principle, they’re capitulating to an authoritarian president. This is not the kind of thing that happens in a democracy; it is familiar to anyone who has spent time in an authoritarian kleptocracy.
Some other law firms are, thankfully, suing, rightly arguing that the Trump executive orders are retaliatory and unconstitutional. And to be clear, a lot of lawyers are also on the right side of the fight against Trump: they’re the ones defending his targets and filing lawsuit after lawsuit trying to keep his worst and most blatantly unconstitutional policies from being implemented.
But their success will depend on which judges they come in front of to argue their case. One of Trump’s biggest successes in his first term was stacking the federal judiciary with hard-right and sometimes blatantly unqualified judges who are now proving predictably willing to do his bidding. These judges are more ideologues than jurists, and they are allowing the White House to continue its assault on the nation.
Even some of the judges on the Supreme Court seem willing to enable Trump, perhaps out of agreement with his aims, or out of fear that he will refuse to comply with their rulings and trigger a true constitutional crisis. The Supreme Court, after all, has no police force and no way to enforce its decisions; its rulings are generally followed because, well, that’s how the separation of powers and American democracy works. I can’t know what is going on in the heads of the nine judges on the highest court. But they have so far treated the Trump administration with a light touch, delaying decisions or issuing narrow ones when they do actually decide. I suspect this might be because they worry the president will simply reject a stronger stance. And if Trump refuses to do what the court says, well – then what?
That kind of democracy-ending catastrophe seems to be the direction in which America is headed. I, too, am stunned by how quickly this regime – and at this point it is more regime than administration – has torn through the constitution, the rule of law, and the basic workings of government. And I am not naive enough to believe that lawyers are all constitution-loving do-gooders (if law school will disabuse you of one notion, it’s that). But I did expect the top law firms in the country to have some fight in them. To be self-interested and greedy, sure – few people go to work at Big Law out of the goodness of their hearts. But when seeing that the whole profession is under attack, I would have hoped that firms, staffed as they are with some of the best legal minds in the nation, would band together to fight for both their own survival and the country’s.
Instead, they’re not just surrendering, they’re collaborating.
When a lawyer is sworn into the Bar, they take an oath to protect the constitution of the United States – not their own bottom line, not the survival of their firm, not their high-status job, but the foundational document of the American system of rights and obligations. Every lawyer who has surrendered to this administration, and every judge who has chosen the president over the constitution, has violated that oath. They’ve revealed themselves as spineless cowards. They’ve shamed their profession. And their disgraceful cravenness may just take the whole country down.
[See also: JD Vance doesn’t understand the Suez Crisis]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer