Last week, a lawyer attending the New York Bar Foundation gala spoke up to heckle Paul Weiss chair Brad Karp over the firm’s deal with the Trump administration. Afterward, a prominent authority on the business of law mused to me that we don’t level enough blame on the rest of the legal industry for failing to organize and take collective action. Paul Weiss and the other capitulating firms found themselves in a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma and found that the faster they made a deal, the better the terms. But the best outcome for the hypothetical prisoners is actually to stick to their principles, assuming no one rats them out. While many lawyers called out the administration’s lawlessness, there wasn’t the unified sense of purpose across the industry — especially across Biglaw — that a firm could rely upon.
But a number of legal professionals want to change that, and start making a public demonstration of the legal community coming together to defend the rule of law — since lawyers should consider themselves the rightful guardians of that principle anyway.
Tomorrow offers something of a second bite at the apple for lawyers.
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“Lawyers March for Democracy” kicks off tomorrow at 1 p.m. outside the Supreme Court. The People’s Parity Project organized the event, backed by Alliance for Justice, the American Constitution Society, Lambda Legal, and a coalition of other progressive legal organizations to “call out the Trump administration’s lawlessness and the Supreme Court’s complicity in Trump’s authoritarianism.”
Through all of the upheavals of the early months of Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court has not only been complicit but has actively participated in Trump’s authoritarian project, siding with the administration over and over again and allowing him to continue blatantly unconstitutional actions without any public legal justification.
Why start at the Supreme Court? Remember the humble ask of the anonymous federal judges who asked the Supreme Court to please say something about the Trump administration telling the January 6 people to go to “war” with us? At least try — they asked the Court — to explain shadow docket opinions so the administration can’t use its media outlets to recast those empty orders as indictments of lower court judges just following existing precedent. Hearing the plea and understanding the gravity of the violent threats mounting against federal judges, the Supreme Court said: nah.
And then Republicans called for a probe to punish the judges for speaking out.
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The Supreme Court makes a lot of sense as a starting point.
The New Republic ran a wonderful piece this week drawing parallels between tomorrow’s march and successful lawyer-led resistance movements around the world. In Pakistan in 2007, lawyers marched — through tear gas and arrests — after President Musharraf suspended the chief justice. They wore their black coats as symbols that the law itself was under siege. Eventually, they prevailed.
Lawyers love their image as the guardians of democracy. Quoting A Man For All Seasons to proclaim themselves the last defense against tyranny is practically the “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” of a law school graduation. But when tyranny actually knocks, the incentives are set up to make it easier to invite it in for tea. At the highest levels, law firms run on access to government actors, expensive staff, and… well, yeah, also big personal paychecks. When an administration launches an existential threat to the business model — and the current Supreme Court gives few guarantees that it would block those illegal threats if called upon — it’s hard to convince individual firms to push back if they don’t feel like the rest of the industry has their back.
And they didn’t. The rest of Biglaw failed to publicly back them up and Karp claims rival firms actively used the Executive Order threat to try to steal talent and business from the firm. At the time when a firm needed industry support the most, at least some of its competitors just saw a chance to throw them under the bus. That those same firms are probably now using the fact that a firm DID make a deal to try to steal talent and business may involve a different ethical positioning, but the underlying problem remains that the industry is so atomized that it presents a custom-built divide and conquer opportunity.
Which is why marches like the one tomorrow are so important. And conferences like the Rule of Law Society recently held. And initiatives defending bar associations and other legal groups that preach profession over employer. Lawyers need to get back to a little of that corny law school idealism and get together.
Lawyers March for Democracy [People’s Parity Project]
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.