Legal Ethics

Call Upon Departmental New York Disciplinary Committee To Disbar Rudy Giuliani

Even before urging that a mob engage in 'combat' during a coup attempt, Rudy Giuliani was an embarrassment to the legal profession.

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

We are all still processing what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and people far better at it than I have already been meticulously laying out the story of the insurrection. But there is one small piece of this disgusting segment of American history that I do feel equipped to talk about.

Admitted lawyers, supposedly in good standing, played a prominent role in this coup attempt. Some served as deranged foot soldiers and rightfully lost jobs as a result. I don’t want to talk about them, though. I want to talk about Rudolph William Louis Giuliani.

Even before urging that a mob engage in “combat” during a coup attempt, Rudy Giuliani was an embarrassment to the legal profession and was clearly incompetent as an attorney. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that Giuliani, after an exemplary early career, eventually became the most incompetent attorney in the history of the legal profession. He repeatedly butt-dialed important people. He left rambling voicemails after accidentally calling the wrong person. He let his hair dye, which frankly wasn’t going to be fooling anyone even had it stayed on his head, run down his face at a public event. He booked a news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping instead of at the Four Seasons hotel. He doesn’t know what strict scrutiny is. After first refusing a COVID-19 test, he let Borat trick him into “tucking in his shirt” in front of a woman so far out of his league astronauts could probably hear those warning bells going off from the vacuum of space. He didn’t go into federal court for nearly three decades, and then somehow thought he should be the go-to election litigator for the president of the United States. Oh, AND HE REPEATEDLY PUSHED DEBUNKED CONSPIRACY THEORIES TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY AND TO TURN AMERICA INTO A DICTATORSHIP!

Before the mob of angry and armed pro-Trump domestic terrorists descended on the U.S. Capitol, Giuliani stood before them and urged them to engage in “trial by combat” to change the legal election results. I’m looking at Giuliani’s Attorney Detail Report on the New York State Unified Court System website right now, and at the moment, he has no record of public discipline. We should change that.

Since I first wrote about Giuliani being a national disgrace, I have received many emails from readers asking how to go about getting him disbarred and/or how to lodge an ethics complaint against him. Pretty much uniformly I thanked them for reaching out and explained the basics of how to lodge a complaint with an attorney disciplinary body, but discouraged them from taking further action, as it was my assumption that nothing would be done about an ethics complaint filed by some random member of the public who wasn’t the client of the lawyer and didn’t directly work with him.

Well, I’ve changed my mind. Rudy Giuliani is the definition of unethical, and he is a danger to democracy, just one step below Trump himself. Giuliani has no right to go on calling himself an attorney, and every moment he continues to have a law license is doing irreparable harm to the legal profession. The more ethics complaints lodged against him, the better. If you want to file an ethics complaint against him, here is a helpful article from the New York State Bar Association that nicely lays out the process. The gist is, you must file a written complaint with the appropriate grievance committee, and then, if the conduct complained of is serious enough, that grievance committee may refer the matter to court for action following an investigation, up to and including disbarment. Giuliani’s given business address is 445 Park Ave., Floor 18, in Manhattan, making the Departmental Disciplinary Committee for the First Department the appropriate committee to address any complaints you may have to. Here is a link to their webpage.

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Giuliani did halfheartedly condemn the violence the day after the coup attempt, while failing to apologize for his role in inciting it. That’s not good enough though. Before we can heal as a nation, there has to be a reckoning for what happened at the Capitol. Frankly, a law license is a small price to pay for trying to destroy democracy. But it’s a start.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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