Twenty-Seven Bar and Lawyer Associations File Amicus Brief on Executive Orders Targeting Law Firms

A group of twenty-seven bar associations and lawyer membership associations has filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, urging the court to affirm lower court rulings that the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting law firms are unconstitutional.

The brief argues that the orders — targeting Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey — retaliate against firms for representing the administration’s political opponents and for filing lawsuits against the government, coerce lawyers into replacing their loyalty to clients with loyalty to the executive branch, and amount to an “assault on the independence of the legal profession.”

The brief’s signatories — including major metropolitan bar associations from New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle — argue that the executive orders co-opt the targeted firms into serving the administration’s agenda; chill other firms from undertaking work disfavored by the administration; and reduce law firms’ participation in pro bono representation of vulnerable individuals, with nonprofit legal organizations reporting a sharp decline in the firm support upon which they depend.

The brief devotes considerable attention to the conflict the orders create with lawyers’ most fundamental professional obligations, including the duty to act with undivided loyalty to their clients, to exercise independent professional judgment, to maintain strict confidentiality over information related to their representations, and to speak and act with candor to the courts.

The amici draw historical parallels to the McCarthy era’s “black silence of fear” that descended on the bar during the Red Scare, to the suppression of civil rights attorneys in the 1950s South, and to the systematic destruction of legal independence in other countries in the past.

The brief states that the Executive Orders “are clear attempts to instill fear in the legal profession and intimidate lawyers into submission, thereby co-opting the bar to be subservient to the executive branch. They chill lawyers’ exercise of constitutional rights and fulfillment of professional duties, and consequently undermine the Judiciary’s ability to check executive power, eroding the rule of law. The Court should affirm the decisions to enjoin these Executive Orders.”

Read the brief here.

The brief was signed by the following associations:

Metropolitan Bar Associations

New York City Bar Association

Bar Association of San Francisco

Beverly Hills Bar Association

Boston Bar Association

Chicago Bar Association

Colorado Bar Association

Denver Bar Association

King County Bar Association

Los Angeles County Bar Association

New York County Lawyers Association

Philadelphia Bar Association

San Diego County Bar Association

Affinity, Specialty, Regional & Local Bar Associations, and Lawyer Membership Associations

Asian American Bar Association of New York

Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area

Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Silicon Valley

Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers

Brehon Law Society of New York City and Nassau County

Lawyers Club of San Diego

Metropolitan Black Bar Association

Monroe County Bar Association

Mother Attorney Mentoring Association of Seattle

Muslim Bar Association of New York

National Association of Women Lawyers

National LGBTQ+ Bar Association

Queen’s Bench Bar Association

Women Lawyers on Guard Action Network, Inc.

Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York

About the New York City Bar Association
The mission of the New York City Bar Association, which was founded in 1870 and has over 20,000 members, is to equip and mobilize a diverse legal profession to practice with excellence, promote reform of the law, and uphold the rule of law and access to justice in support of a fair society and the public interest in our community, our nation, and throughout the world. www.nycbar.org