Skadden's Jeremy London, though, tried to explain the firm's capitulation. Also: A law firm partner provided Law Dork with a "parable" of two paths for firms in this moment.
With the anticipated thousands [million+?] of heroic protestors on April 5th (actually any and all days, including Women's March) here's an updated partial list of those fighting back every day [as of 3-29-25). I'm also adding courageous law firms who haven't caved. Besides upstanding lawyers, and law-abiding honorable (present and former) judges (including James Boasberg, chief judge, D.C. District Ct.), here's a growing list of Profiles in Courage men, women, and advocacy groups who refuse to be cowed or kneel to the force of Trump/Musk/MAGA/Fox "News" intimidation:
I'll begin (again) with Missouri's own indomitable Jess[ica] (à la John Lewis's "get in good trouble") Piper/"The View from Rural Missouri," then, in no particular order, Heather Cox Richardson/"Letters from an American," Joyce Vance/"Civil Discourse," Bernie Sanders, AOC, Gov. Tim walz, Sarah Inama, Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Jasmine Crockett, Ruth Ben-Ghait, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Hayes, Ali Velshi, Stephanie Miller, Gov. Janet Mills, Gov. Beshear, Gov. JB.Pritzker, Mayor Michelle Wu, J im Acosta, Jen Rubin And the Contrarians, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Jay Kou, Steve Brodner, Rachel Cohen, Brian TylerCohen, Jessica Craven, Scott Dworkin, Brett Meiselas, Joy Reid, D. Earl Stevens, Melvin Gurai
Anne Applebaum, Lucian Truscott IV, Chris Murphy, Jeff Merkley, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth,Sheldon Whitehouse, Adam Schiff, Jon Ossoff, Elyssa Slotkin, Tristan Snell, Delia Ramirez,Tim Snyder, Robert B. Hubbell, Ben Meiseilas, Rich wilson, Ron Filpkowski, Jeremy Seahill, Thom Hartmann, Jonathan Bernstein, Simon Rosenberg, Marianne Williamson, Mark Fiore, Jamie Raskin, Rebecca Solnit, Steve Schmidt, Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman, Andy Borowitz, Jeff Danziger, Ann Telnaes,͏ ͏Will Bunch, Jim Hightower, Dan Pfeifer, Dean Obeidallah, Liz Cheney, Adam Kimzinger, Cassidy Hutchinson--
American Bar Association, 23 blue state Attorney Generals, Indivisible. FiftyFifty one, MoveOn, DemCast, Blue Missouri, Third Act, Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Democracy Index, Protect Democracy, DemocracyLabs, Fred Wellman/On Democracy, Hands Off, Marc Elias/Democracy Docket, Public Citizen, League of Women Voters, Lambda Legal, CREW, CODEPINK, ACLU, The 19th/Errin Haines, Working Families Party, American Oversight, Every State Blue, Run for Something, Jessica Valenti/Abortion Everyday, The American Manifesto
The Dr. Martin Luther King Center.
And, as Joyce Vance says, "We're in this together"--or via Jess Piper, from rural Missouri: "Solidarity." FIGHT BACK! WE ARE NOT ALONE! (Latest addition h/t , Robert B. Hubbell: Law firms, see below). All suggestions are welcome.
* Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling have resisted Trump, fighting back with the help of other courageous firms like Williams & Connolly. Per The ABA Journal,
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, representing fired inspectors general. (Law.com)
Hogan Lovells, seeking to block executive orders to end federal funding for gender-affirming medical care. (Law.com)
Jenner & Block, also seeking to block the orders on cuts to medical research funding. (Law.com, Reuters)
Ropes & Gray, also seeking to block cuts to medical research funding. (Law.com)
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, representing the Amica Center for Immigrants Rights and others seeking to block funding cuts for immigrant legal services. (Law.com)
Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer.
Wilmer Hale
Keker, Van Nest & Peters
Southern Poverty Law Center
Perhaps I should add our nation's motto--and on our Great Seal--the phrase "E pluribus unum" (out of many, One ). Ii's 13 letters makes its use symbolic of the original 13 Colonies which rebelled against the rule of the Kingdom of George III . . .And now we protest together against King Donald. As my rural MO. indomitable Jess Piper always says: "Solidarity"
People who study such things say it takes 3.5% of a group to push that group to change.
3.5% of the US population is about 12 million people. Let's be keeping that in mind as we invite folks to join us on April 5 Hands Off country-wide protest. If you can't to to Washington DC, go to your state capital. If you can't do that, look up Hands Off protest locations.
If a protest group is registered as part of the Hands Off group, the number of attendees will be added to the state total.
For medical reasons I can't travel far, so I found a registered Hands Off group close by. So I'll be counted.
With all these locations, we can bring LOTS of people around the country. I'm pretty sure we'll be in the millions. But I'm keeping that 12 million people as a number to hit, to start rocking the boat.
Let’s see now … law firms practicing within the rules of law are to be held for ransom; but lawyers - and one federal judge - who delay and argue politics not law, are esteemed and rewarded for bad behavior.
So, Paul Weiss committed 40M in pro bono work and Skadden threw in 100M-without an EO. What geniuses. The next law firm to obey in advance will probably get hit with a 200M+ shake down.
Clearly these folks did not do their homework. These firms showed weakness to their authoritarian master. Trump loves nothing more than to humiliate those who have bent the knee. We shouldn’t be surprised if trump requires them to provide pro bono representation to some really heinous individuals or groups.
I would love to see a sociological study of the overlaps of Big Law, the Judiciary (particularly federal) and DOJ. These are communities with a lot of ties and interaction on a personal level. Major law schools too. There is at least the potential for these groups to coalesce into a formidable obstacle to Trumps project, even if not by design.
We must name it. Our inability to name it is due to the atomic bomb of disinformation and chaos that has been unleashed on us. If we name it, we can understand what we are seeing and be able to strategize and counter-attack.
This is WWIII. This insanity. WWIII has begun.
Trump/Musk/Vance/Putin all work for the criminal syndicate Russia. They have started WWWIII and are attacking us this very minute. The destruction of our economy, rule of law, and way of life is intentional. The fear, damage, cruelty, inhumanity, and destruction is the point. This is war. Netanyahu is on their side, other authoritarian and right-wing leaders are on their side.
To them, democracy is the enemy. We are the enemy. They want to rape and pillage and starve and torture and kill us.
Their intention is to wipe democracies off the face of the earth. They plan to attack Canada from the south (USA) and also from the north (Russia), they need Greenland to help with their attack of Europe. Yes they want all of the minerals and precious natural resources, etc…but militarily, that’s why they want them.
To our military, former presidents, judges, free press, scientists, and democratic allies. You have the skills, expertise, knowledge, that once united will allow us to fight back and to guide and help the USA and our allies in responding to an extinction level attack on us.
Unite. Come together to tell the world what is happening. You want to stay in your lane and think it’s not your place and not your job, but your lane is being blown up, along with the rest of the country, so that’s no longer an option. It’s not an option for any of us.
We do not need to blame Russia for evil that the US is perfectly capable of committing and has repeatedly and happily committed multiple times throughout its existence.
I think the true threat faced by the big law firms is not reputational, as that hypothetical obituary implies. It’s whether an independent judiciary continues to exist throughout and after the Trump administration.
Then again, if the coin of the judicial realm becomes access to trump, then the firms that played ball might be the best positioned to operate in the new fake legal system…
This is the nub of the issue that faces us as a country though it now the law firms that are the focus of his predations: "Despite what Karp and London seem to think, Donald Trump is not going to stop. He is not going to be satisfied with their current capitulation, and the next time they dare to do something that angers him, he will be back."
Like that recurring nightmare, he will be back and what worries me more is that this same animus will extend itself to those who demonstrate and protest against this government's actions.
If you "kill all the lawyers" who is left to represent the interests of the citizens who put themselves forward to protest? This strikes me most prominently in the area of immigration law and the immigrants (the LPRs as well as the undocumented) themselves as those most in need of legal protections and at the same time least able to afford the legal services they need to deal with warrantless searches, arrests and removal actions without due process of law.
I look at someone like Homan and all I see is Jim Clark, just waiting for the opportunity to let loose on the demonstrators.
One question if you check the notes - Is there a good book on Immigration Law for those of us who want to educate ourselves?
Thank you for providing links to the judges’ orders. One of the most striking aspects of their orders is the alarming dearth of insight into their reasoning regarding our most important and fundamental liberties—the freedom of speech and press. For hundreds of years (when it suits them) judges have invoked Chief Justice John Marshall’s admonition in Marbury v. Madison that the “duty” of judges under our Constitution is to explicitly “say what the [governing] law is.” Judges “who apply [a] rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule” so that they may “decide on the operation of” such rule.
The duty of federal judges is not merely to render judgment. Their duties include justifying their judgment. At the very least, they could (and should) invoke the venerable precedent of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). The Nazis in Germany abused the so-called rule of law back then to compel unanimity of opinion and to coerce acquiescence to authoritarianism. What SCOTUS said then (in Barnette) is relevant to what Trump is doing now:
"Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. . . . [T]he First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here [in America] is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority."
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
With the anticipated thousands [million+?] of heroic protestors on April 5th (actually any and all days, including Women's March) here's an updated partial list of those fighting back every day [as of 3-29-25). I'm also adding courageous law firms who haven't caved. Besides upstanding lawyers, and law-abiding honorable (present and former) judges (including James Boasberg, chief judge, D.C. District Ct.), here's a growing list of Profiles in Courage men, women, and advocacy groups who refuse to be cowed or kneel to the force of Trump/Musk/MAGA/Fox "News" intimidation:
I'll begin (again) with Missouri's own indomitable Jess[ica] (à la John Lewis's "get in good trouble") Piper/"The View from Rural Missouri," then, in no particular order, Heather Cox Richardson/"Letters from an American," Joyce Vance/"Civil Discourse," Bernie Sanders, AOC, Gov. Tim walz, Sarah Inama, Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Jasmine Crockett, Ruth Ben-Ghait, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Hayes, Ali Velshi, Stephanie Miller, Gov. Janet Mills, Gov. Beshear, Gov. JB.Pritzker, Mayor Michelle Wu, J im Acosta, Jen Rubin And the Contrarians, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Jay Kou, Steve Brodner, Rachel Cohen, Brian TylerCohen, Jessica Craven, Scott Dworkin, Brett Meiselas, Joy Reid, D. Earl Stevens, Melvin Gurai
Anne Applebaum, Lucian Truscott IV, Chris Murphy, Jeff Merkley, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth,Sheldon Whitehouse, Adam Schiff, Jon Ossoff, Elyssa Slotkin, Tristan Snell, Delia Ramirez,Tim Snyder, Robert B. Hubbell, Ben Meiseilas, Rich wilson, Ron Filpkowski, Jeremy Seahill, Thom Hartmann, Jonathan Bernstein, Simon Rosenberg, Marianne Williamson, Mark Fiore, Jamie Raskin, Rebecca Solnit, Steve Schmidt, Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman, Andy Borowitz, Jeff Danziger, Ann Telnaes,͏ ͏Will Bunch, Jim Hightower, Dan Pfeifer, Dean Obeidallah, Liz Cheney, Adam Kimzinger, Cassidy Hutchinson--
American Bar Association, 23 blue state Attorney Generals, Indivisible. FiftyFifty one, MoveOn, DemCast, Blue Missouri, Third Act, Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Democracy Index, Protect Democracy, DemocracyLabs, Fred Wellman/On Democracy, Hands Off, Marc Elias/Democracy Docket, Public Citizen, League of Women Voters, Lambda Legal, CREW, CODEPINK, ACLU, The 19th/Errin Haines, Working Families Party, American Oversight, Every State Blue, Run for Something, Jessica Valenti/Abortion Everyday, The American Manifesto
The Dr. Martin Luther King Center.
And, as Joyce Vance says, "We're in this together"--or via Jess Piper, from rural Missouri: "Solidarity." FIGHT BACK! WE ARE NOT ALONE! (Latest addition h/t , Robert B. Hubbell: Law firms, see below). All suggestions are welcome.
* Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling have resisted Trump, fighting back with the help of other courageous firms like Williams & Connolly. Per The ABA Journal,
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, representing fired inspectors general. (Law.com)
Hogan Lovells, seeking to block executive orders to end federal funding for gender-affirming medical care. (Law.com)
Jenner & Block, also seeking to block the orders on cuts to medical research funding. (Law.com, Reuters)
Ropes & Gray, also seeking to block cuts to medical research funding. (Law.com)
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, representing the Amica Center for Immigrants Rights and others seeking to block funding cuts for immigrant legal services. (Law.com)
Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer.
Wilmer Hale
Keker, Van Nest & Peters
Southern Poverty Law Center
Perhaps I should add our nation's motto--and on our Great Seal--the phrase "E pluribus unum" (out of many, One ). Ii's 13 letters makes its use symbolic of the original 13 Colonies which rebelled against the rule of the Kingdom of George III . . .And now we protest together against King Donald. As my rural MO. indomitable Jess Piper always says: "Solidarity"
Love your list!
People who study such things say it takes 3.5% of a group to push that group to change.
3.5% of the US population is about 12 million people. Let's be keeping that in mind as we invite folks to join us on April 5 Hands Off country-wide protest. If you can't to to Washington DC, go to your state capital. If you can't do that, look up Hands Off protest locations.
If a protest group is registered as part of the Hands Off group, the number of attendees will be added to the state total.
For medical reasons I can't travel far, so I found a registered Hands Off group close by. So I'll be counted.
With all these locations, we can bring LOTS of people around the country. I'm pretty sure we'll be in the millions. But I'm keeping that 12 million people as a number to hit, to start rocking the boat.
Amen - fantastic list and all deserve our respect.
So Trump wants Skadden to defend a Red State's total ban on abortion. Which Skadden lawyers are going to do it?
One of the hordes of new hires that will be flocking to them.
In other words, the worst lawyers no one else will hire
Let’s see now … law firms practicing within the rules of law are to be held for ransom; but lawyers - and one federal judge - who delay and argue politics not law, are esteemed and rewarded for bad behavior.
Your choice: show trial or Star Chamber.
These writs of attainder must not stand!
So, Paul Weiss committed 40M in pro bono work and Skadden threw in 100M-without an EO. What geniuses. The next law firm to obey in advance will probably get hit with a 200M+ shake down.
Clearly these folks did not do their homework. These firms showed weakness to their authoritarian master. Trump loves nothing more than to humiliate those who have bent the knee. We shouldn’t be surprised if trump requires them to provide pro bono representation to some really heinous individuals or groups.
I would love to see a sociological study of the overlaps of Big Law, the Judiciary (particularly federal) and DOJ. These are communities with a lot of ties and interaction on a personal level. Major law schools too. There is at least the potential for these groups to coalesce into a formidable obstacle to Trumps project, even if not by design.
I think Rubio is wrong and we need a little ruckus every now and then!
I love the imaginary future-casting of how we would see standing strong, or caving in, in retrospect.
100% spot on.
And when they came for me …
We must name it. Our inability to name it is due to the atomic bomb of disinformation and chaos that has been unleashed on us. If we name it, we can understand what we are seeing and be able to strategize and counter-attack.
This is WWIII. This insanity. WWIII has begun.
Trump/Musk/Vance/Putin all work for the criminal syndicate Russia. They have started WWWIII and are attacking us this very minute. The destruction of our economy, rule of law, and way of life is intentional. The fear, damage, cruelty, inhumanity, and destruction is the point. This is war. Netanyahu is on their side, other authoritarian and right-wing leaders are on their side.
To them, democracy is the enemy. We are the enemy. They want to rape and pillage and starve and torture and kill us.
Their intention is to wipe democracies off the face of the earth. They plan to attack Canada from the south (USA) and also from the north (Russia), they need Greenland to help with their attack of Europe. Yes they want all of the minerals and precious natural resources, etc…but militarily, that’s why they want them.
To our military, former presidents, judges, free press, scientists, and democratic allies. You have the skills, expertise, knowledge, that once united will allow us to fight back and to guide and help the USA and our allies in responding to an extinction level attack on us.
Unite. Come together to tell the world what is happening. You want to stay in your lane and think it’s not your place and not your job, but your lane is being blown up, along with the rest of the country, so that’s no longer an option. It’s not an option for any of us.
We do not need to blame Russia for evil that the US is perfectly capable of committing and has repeatedly and happily committed multiple times throughout its existence.
Damn, his parable is more fun than what I wrote.
I think the true threat faced by the big law firms is not reputational, as that hypothetical obituary implies. It’s whether an independent judiciary continues to exist throughout and after the Trump administration.
Then again, if the coin of the judicial realm becomes access to trump, then the firms that played ball might be the best positioned to operate in the new fake legal system…
On the one hand you have law firms that so believe in the rule of law that they'll fight a powerful enemy who seeks to undermine that law.
On the other hand, you have cowards.
This is the nub of the issue that faces us as a country though it now the law firms that are the focus of his predations: "Despite what Karp and London seem to think, Donald Trump is not going to stop. He is not going to be satisfied with their current capitulation, and the next time they dare to do something that angers him, he will be back."
Like that recurring nightmare, he will be back and what worries me more is that this same animus will extend itself to those who demonstrate and protest against this government's actions.
If you "kill all the lawyers" who is left to represent the interests of the citizens who put themselves forward to protest? This strikes me most prominently in the area of immigration law and the immigrants (the LPRs as well as the undocumented) themselves as those most in need of legal protections and at the same time least able to afford the legal services they need to deal with warrantless searches, arrests and removal actions without due process of law.
I look at someone like Homan and all I see is Jim Clark, just waiting for the opportunity to let loose on the demonstrators.
One question if you check the notes - Is there a good book on Immigration Law for those of us who want to educate ourselves?
The Skadden deal, as quoted, could prove to be a very cheap decision for the firm. Very cheap, indeed.
Thank you for providing links to the judges’ orders. One of the most striking aspects of their orders is the alarming dearth of insight into their reasoning regarding our most important and fundamental liberties—the freedom of speech and press. For hundreds of years (when it suits them) judges have invoked Chief Justice John Marshall’s admonition in Marbury v. Madison that the “duty” of judges under our Constitution is to explicitly “say what the [governing] law is.” Judges “who apply [a] rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule” so that they may “decide on the operation of” such rule.
The duty of federal judges is not merely to render judgment. Their duties include justifying their judgment. At the very least, they could (and should) invoke the venerable precedent of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). The Nazis in Germany abused the so-called rule of law back then to compel unanimity of opinion and to coerce acquiescence to authoritarianism. What SCOTUS said then (in Barnette) is relevant to what Trump is doing now:
"Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. . . . [T]he First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here [in America] is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority."
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
If a law firm won't vigorously defend itself and the rule of law, why would I trust it to defend me?