The law must not bend to Trump’s crusade of political retribution

On Monday, the Trump administration continued its assault on America's most prestigious law firms when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent letters to 20 firms inquiring about their use of DEI in hiring. That letter suggested they may have been discriminating against white applicants.

The letters came one day after the president told Fox News, “We have a lot of law firms that we’re going to be going after because they were very dishonest people.” Last Friday, President Trump signed an executive order singling out Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and one of its lawyers, Mark Pomerantz, who had taken part in the New York hush-money case against Trump.

The order launched a multi-pronged attack designed to exact retribution from the firm, calling its lawyers “partisan actors who exploit their influence.” The president suspended Paul Weiss’s security clearances; restricted its lawyers’ access to government buildings; directed federal agencies not to hire Paul Weiss employees; terminated existing contracts with the firm; and initiated a review to ensure that the firm was in compliance with civil rights laws against racial bias.

Paul Weiss joins two other influential law firms that have made the president’s enemies list.

One of them, Covington & Burling, committed the sin of representing former special counsel Jack Smith, who indicted the president in 2023. Perkins Coie, whose lawyers advised Hilary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign and collaborated in advancing claims about Trump and his alleged ties to Russia, also drew the ire of the president.

As journalist Vivia Chen noted earlier this month, the president’s actions put “Big Law on notice that he will crush any law firm that represents a client he regards as a nemesis.”

Big Law has gotten the message. Unfortunately, the response of America’s largest and most important firms to the president’s all-out-assault on the legal profession has been exactly as he might have hoped. They have looked the other way.

Some have refused to represent their colleagues in the targeted firms. Their refusal allows authoritarianism to grow deeper roots, crippling the very forces that seek to hold our government accountable.

These firms are putting profit over principle, worrying about their bottom line more than the looming collapse of the constitutional order. Lawyers should not sit on the sidelines as firms and judges are attacked merely for doing their jobs.

The threat is clear. J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge, called Trump’s executive order directed against Perkins Coie “sinister” — a part of a “full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of justice, and the entire legal profession.”

And, after Perkins Coie filed suit claiming that the president’s action violated due process, equal protection, their free-speech and associational rights, and their right to counsel, Federal District Judge Beryl Howell accused Trump of “using taxpayer dollars for a personal vendetta.” She went on to say that what the president is doing “threatens to significantly undermine our entire legal system and the ability of all people to access justice.”

The choice for the legal profession is clear: silence or action.

Whether the Constitution can withstand the president’s onslaught depends in part on how lawyers and the firms in which they work respond. They should unite and make saving the rule of law their top priority.

If they do not, the American legal profession will have a lot of explaining to do.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lauren Stiller Rikleen is executive director of Lawyers Defending American Democracy and the editor of "Her Honor — Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women Judges."

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