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A lightly edited transcript follows.
LAW DORK: As the week is proceeding, we see day by day, minute by minute, additional, new latest statements and tweets and posts from Trump and the Trump administration that very quickly raised the question of, what are people doing in response and who is pushing back? And one of the areas where that is happening the most consistently over this past 10 months is in state AGs offices. And we are lucky enough to have New Jersey AG Matthew Platkin here with us today to talk about the work that New Jersey is doing, the response that New Jersey has gotten, and what lessons you have learned from this this first 10 months of the Trump administration. Now, having worked in an AGs office and covered AGs for a long time, I always like to tell people that New Jersey is is one of the few state attorneys general who isn’t elected.
To start, we’re at the start of a new Supreme Court term, and you’ve been in office now for three years, three and a half years, and obviously your job changed dramatically in in January. For people who don’t know you or haven’t been paying attention to what role New Jersey has played in it, what sort of message to, mission for yourself and message to your staff going in to this, this new year?
MATTHEW PLATKIN: Yeah, well, Chris, first of all, thank you so much for having me. And you know, sometimes when I get asked to do things, I’m like, Oh, what are they? You know, does it really make sense for me? I feel pretty good about being on something called Law Dork. I feel like I fit in here. So I’m really grateful.
And, yeah, look, the job has definitely been different since January 20, in some respects, but in other respects, it’s been very similar. And I think my message internally, externally, referred has been kind of the same, which is my job as attorney general. And you know, state attorneys general, well, our jobs are to keep the residents of our state safe, and we do that against whomever is threatening people in our state. We do it on gun violence, we do it on consumer protection. we do it to protect from bias, and now we’re filing a whole bunch of lawsuits, unfortunately, to protect our states from the federal government, who is very clearly and openly trying to unlawfully hurt the people in our state. And so I kind of feel like what we’re doing is we’re doing our jobs. And the bigger question to me is for states that have not joined our suits, is, “How are you being consistent with the oath you took?” “Is the President allowed to unlawfully target residents in your state, to gut cut funding in violation of the separation of powers, to rewrite the Constitution to distribute federally banned firearms,” which was actually a case that we had to sue over, and we could go into any of those, but really, to me, this is an extension of our responsibility to protect the residents of our state and uphold the rule of law.
LAW DORK: As we all know, or it feels like it was three years ago at this point, but obviously, things started very, very quickly with all of the executive orders that were signed on January 20, and you all managed to get a multistate coalition together to file your lawsuit challenging the executive order to end birthright citizenship the very next day. First of all, just so that people can understand, how do you bring that together that quickly? Multistate litigation was something that I worked on in the Ohio AGs office, and I think it’s just been such an important part of this year’s efforts. What do you actually do to bring that together and get that that lawsuit filed within 24-28 hours of of the order being announced?
PLATKIN: Yeah, so we have a coalition of 23 states in the District of Columbia, which should be a state, and hopefully one day, will be —
LAW DORK: Thank you.
PLATKIN: And by the way, I’m sure we’ll get into the National Guard stuff, but it’s really I was just in Chicago and DC. This is a real assault on people’s rights and our and local sovereignty in this country, but we have a coalition of states that have been committed to doing this work in a collaborative fashion to protect our residents. And it didn’t start on January, 20. We actually started at the beginning of 2024, and I think we had to, we had to take seriously what was being said in Project 2025, on the campaign trail. And a lot of what they have done has been quite literally what they said they would do. And when you looked at it, you know there were a lot of things in there, as have proven to be true, that would violate the law and hurt the residents of our state, which I’ve said many times, are the two questions I ask of every case we file, whether it’s against the federal government, a social media company, an environmental polluter, or whatever it is. And so we did a lot of work in advance of January 20, so that at 8pm on January 20, when President Trump — it still boggles my mind, I know there’s petition for certification before the Supreme Court that the President of the United States would sign an executive order that very clearly rewrites the 14th Amendment of the Constitution for the first time in 157 years, to exclude babies born on US soil from the rights and privileges of US citizenship, something that had been settled, as you know, in the 1890s in the Wong Kim Ark case by the Supreme Court. This was not like a close call. Jim Ho agreed with us in writing a few decades ago, so we were prepared the next morning, 8:11am, to go into court. Now, the team, I give them tremendous credit in our office and offices across the country, worked through the night, stayed up through the night because of how important it was, and it really I’d like to say it’s slowed down since then, but it hasn’t, because the pace that they’ve operated on, the scale that they’ve operated on, and the impact they’re having in our states has been devastating. And but for our lawsuits, in many instances, people would lose their education, their health care, their rights and privileges as US citizens. And so I’m proud of the work that we’re doing, but we have had to do it in a coordinated fashion across this coalition. Again, I just go back to what I said before. What I don’t understand is how you don’t join that coalition, when some of the things — and I understand politics — but when some of the things that are happening to your state, how you don’t — I sued the Biden administration, so I have some credibility on this point. These a lot of times, are not, and should not be partisan issues. Unfortunately, they have become them.
LAW DORK: I don’t remember if it was, was your your staff arguing it, or when it came up, but it did come up that, you had these multistate cases that were being raised, and that because of these universal injunctions, that there was almost this feeling that some of the states were probably glad you all were doing it, and they didn’t need to bring it because there was going to be a universal injunction. But then the Supreme Court issued its order in these cases, and as to some of them, tossed out universal injunctions. Now, obviously there was this side issue of you can get complete relief, and in the case of the birthright citizenship order, both of the multistate coalitions argued, had argued the whole time, that you needed nationwide relief, and those have been upheld post-the June Supreme Court ruling, and you obviously got a First Circuit opinion affirming that continued injunction just last Friday. In light of the fact that the cert filing in the other cases is already before the Supreme Court, have you all decided — are you just taking a back seat and seeing what the Trump administration does if they tried to bring yours up [to the Supreme Court] as well, or will your case sort of sit back while the others go forward?
PLATKIN: Well, look, in this case, we have two lawsuits in two circuits with two coalitions we work really closely across. And so just the point you made earlier, is a really important one that and our Solicitor General, Jeremy Feigenbaum, argued the case last spring about nationwide injunctions in this and it was just sort of striking to me, and frankly, remarkable that the Supreme Court took the nationwide injunctions question on the birthright citizenship case. I share, and we were very clear about this. I share some concerns about nationwide injunctions. I do think they should be used in limited circumstances, and we laid out when that when that was appropriate. We’ve had, we’ve seen an abuse of nationwide injunctions on the other side. But very clearly in cases like this one where states cannot get complete relief. And think about the absurdity of birthright citizenship being decided based on whether or not your state attorney general happened to join a lawsuit that isn’t like the textbook case, where you’d want a unified system of immigration under a nationwide injunction. That’s why I think we have gotten nationwide relief.
LAW DORK: You all had the you all had the benefit, for better or worse, and Feigenbaum did make a that was a great point of Philadelphia, and that because Pennsylvania elected a Republican AG, last year, despite having a Democratic governor, they’re not in your coalition. And so you have this issue specifically with New Jersey, with the fact that there are 1000s of New Jersey residents born in Philadelphia hospitals each year.
PLATKIN: Yeah, sometimes by choice, or sometimes because they happen to be in Pennsylvania, going to the store, going to work, you know? And so, yeah, it was an absurd argument, and that decision was, frankly, substantively, not super-unexpected, and they gave states very clearly the ability to keep it. It was rhetorically, I think, much stronger and more over the top than it needed to be given the substance of the case. But now we expect, the federal government is going up there. We expect the Supreme Court will take one or both of these cases on the question of whether 14th Amendment applies to babies born on US soil. I’m very proud that we’re doing this. We’re a state of immigrants. I’m very — I sit here very close to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, which we won a Supreme Court case about being partially in New Jersey — but the fact that we’re litigating this deeply offends me. This is a core protection that we put in the Constitution, not because there was some trivial debate we were having. We put it in there to settle a debate that we had a civil war over, and yet here we are with the president rewriting it, and this issue being taken so seriously by the federal administration that they’re litigating it up to the highest court in the land. Now, I’m confident we will win on that merits question, but there are a whole lot of resources that are being spent fighting for something that everyone I believe deep down knows is a ridiculous legal argument on the other side.
LAW DORK: I thought I would be spending the weekend getting ready for the new Supreme Court term, because that’s, that’s what I do —
PLATKIN: God bless you.
LAW DORK: Yeah, I mean, for as little as I wanted to do that, but then ended up spending Sunday night listening in on a hearing in Oregon over these additional National Guard troop movements from California, the possibility of National Guard from Texas being deployed. There have been these cases. I think there’s going to be one hearing starting — maybe it just started — in Illinois over protests there. There’s going to be a hearing on National Guard tomorrow. Speaking of things that you didn’t think that you would be doing in your role as Attorney General. How should people be thinking about about these troop deployments and the administration? I haven’t even had a chance to read, but apparently, there’s a story today about serious consideration of invoking the Insurrection Act. I mean, how are you thinking about that? And how should people who are following these things, the type of people who would be subscribed to Law Dork and listening to this conversation? I mean, how should we be thinking about this, and what should people be doing?
PLATKIN: I think everyone should be deeply alarmed. I mean, the idea that the President would send the National Guard and the United States military into cities and states across the country specifically because he disagrees with them politically in ways that puts them at risk, puts our residents at risk. It violates the law. I mean, this is not normal stuff. This is not like the usual, “Well, we disagree with the President’s the extent of his administrative authority on issue X, Y or Z.” This is core American democratic republic questions, and we are in court. Attorneys General Brian Schwab in DC, Kwame roll in Illinois, Dan Rayfield in Oregon, Rob Bonta in California. They’re litigating whether the military of this nation can be weaponized against their own residents. I think very clearly they’re right under the law, but this also needs to be won, and this matters both for the quote, unquote law dorks of the world, but also for every American citizen who cares. This needs to be won the court of public opinion. We cannot allow a president to send the United States military into cities across the country simply because he doesn’t like them or doesn’t like their elected leaders. That is a really scary prospect.
I was in Chicago earlier this week. I’ve spent a lot of time in DC over the past few weeks. This is a complete stunt. There is no public safety narrative that is legitimate. What they are doing is using that as a pretext. And frankly, I have to laugh a little bit when I see states like Mississippi sending National Guardsmen and women into harm’s way in other states, supposedly remote, law and order. You’re six times more likely to be shot and killed in Mississippi than you are in New Jersey. I’m not going to be lectured about how to keep residents safe by a state like Mississippi. If they want to actually keep people safe, talk to us about what we’re doing to combat gun violence in the densest state in the nation. That’s not what this is about. This is about politics, and they’re using men and women who signed up to serve this nation in unlawful ways in order to prove or score cheap political points. And that is a really scary prospect that we have never seen, certainly in modern American history.
LAW DORK: Bing a DC resident, it is something that has been going on since August, and we’re sitting here. Just yesterday — I mean, it’s both this very like, concerning reality, and also you can go because it’s such a stunt, like, depending on where your week takes you, you can literally go a week without seeing anybody, because it is literally a photo-op deployment. And so if you aren’t going to Union Station or Georgetown or the National Mall, you might not see them. But then, like, I live on 14th Street, and there will just be a handful of National Guard troops walking up and down the street with guns. It’s it’s utterly absurd. And that’s outside of the sort of aggressive, truly abhorrent posts that we’re seeing from from from Trump. It’s obviously much more. Those have been sort of the high-profile, hot-button issues over recent weeks, but you all have been like digging in — the AGs — on so many different levels with the funding, the firings, the grants, the agencies being shuttered. How, when there is so much that he’s doing, are you all deciding what to target and how to target it?
PLATKIN: Well, we’re going back to those two core questions that I mentioned earlier. In this case, is the administration, the president, breaking the law, and are they hurting the people in our state? Obviously, those are two pretty core questions to whether we have standing to sue as well. But we look at those, and we do look at everything, and there have been things that we have not sued on. Obviously, look, the President is powerful in this nation. No one is disputing that. I believe that, but the President is also constrained by a constitution and the laws of this nation. And some of these things are like first day, civics class stuff. If you look at many of our suits, the funding cases are really good examples of this, what we’re really doing is asserting Congress’s right to appropriate spending. And why did we have that protection in the Constitution? That’s not, again, something that the founders of this nation did on a whim, because, “Oh, we didn’t know what to do.” So they gave Congress that power. They did it specifically to prevent a president from acting like a tyrant. Because if you can withhold the entire power of the purse and punish your political enemies with serious cuts to funding.
We’re not talking about little fringe issues. Some of the grants are smaller. Some of them are like the entire DOT funding for your state, so all of your roads, bridges, rail. Some of them are like your health care system. These are your university system. Massive amounts of money you can cripple states and their economies. That is not what the founders of this nation said the President had the power to do that. When Congress passes spending, puts it into a law, the President signs that, that’s it. There’s limited ways the president can affect that. He can’t turn, say, the entire transportation infrastructure spending program into an immigration program. That’s not what it is. If Congress wanted to do that, they can pass laws, and we’d still litigate that, but there are ways for them to do certain things. That’s not what they did. And so a lot of our cases have been about standing up for states and for the role of Congress to do to make decisions, and not the president.
But there is no doubt their their general strategy is to move really fast, to do so much — you hear flooding the zone. I kind of hate that term, because it’s like, if you do one bad thing, it’s bad. If you do 20 bad things, they’re still all bad. It doesn’t make it better because you did 20. It does mean we have had to move faster. And candidly, we’ve been operating in a climate where too few, not all — we’ve seen some heroic acts by lawyers in the private sector, and not for profits, but far fewer than we would have expected a year ago. There were some things we expected. I did not expect, sort of, the quick capitulation of large sectors of the legal industry, which has put more pressure, I’d say, on us and on the the organizations that are fighting to stand up for the rule of law.
LAW DORK: No, I think that that’s definitely true. Also, obviously you have the end of the road being the Supreme Court for these cases, and that has led to — on several fronts, from from grants and funding cases to certainly the firing efforts cases — the Supreme Court just shutting shutting it down on the shadow docket. How, when you’re thinking about these cases, when you’re you’re fighting them on appeal, what is your thought about, like, the Supreme Court is eventually going to get this. How are you addressing that? Or is there anything you’re doing to try to to Supreme Court-proof the cases?
PLATKIN: Look, the Supreme Court is an important institution. They obviously play a role here. I think any good strategic litigator is going to think about how their case might go up on appeal. And you have to be cognizant of the reality that if you’re suing the President and his administration over something that’s this significant, the Supreme Court is going to take its bite at the apple at some point, and, you know, at some point they get to decide it. That’s the way our system works. By the way, big difference between what I’m saying here and what the United States government is saying even about some things that the Supreme Court has has done in terms of questioning whether courts have legitimacy in issuing decisions. Of course, they do. You don’t like it, appeal it, but you don’t get the right to just disregard it, as was the subject of the argument that you mentioned in Oregon just a night or two ago.
I will say one thing that has deeply disappointed me is how eager the Supreme Court has seemed to use the shadow docket to get involved in cases before they are ripe for Supreme Court review. I mean, this is not something we’ve seen before — treating shadow docket decisions that sometimes are a few sentences or a few paragraphs long as precedential decisions on very complex issues of law. The Supreme Court has seemed like almost overeager to jump into these fights, not telling us even what questions presented on them, not giving parties chances to adequately brief the issues or address their concerns. That is not the way this court is supposed to function. It’s not the way it’s supposed to take issues of this magnitude. It’s supposed to be — litigation is supposed to be a slower moving process, for a reason, and historically, has been so. I will say that’s been frustrating, especially when you get some of these orders on key issues and there’s almost no justification, right? And yet, you’re supposed to somehow figure out what that means in the context of, for instance, billions of dollars of federal spending.
LAW DORK: I mean the spending, the NIH spending decision, was truly out there. On the other hand, there are those cases that just seem like they’re so bad that I’ve written about and talked about the fact that it appears that DOJ is slow walking the litigation, either because they know it’s a loser, they don’t want to make Trump mad, or some combination of both. And I think the biggest example of that is those law firms that did fight back, and starting with Perkins Coie and Wilmer Hale and Jenner & Block and Sussman Godfrey, and all four have won all four. DOJ waited until the last minute to appeal, they didn’t seek stays, they didn’t go up to the Supreme Court, and now, just today, the DC Circuit gave them a stay of all deadlines on appeal while the shutdown is happening, which I think DOJ is thrilled to put that off even further. How, as a lawyer, I mean, just to quote Judge Immergut on Sunday night, as an officer of the court, what do you take from the way that law firms have either capitulated or fought back?
PLATKIN: I I think one of the core foundational principles of our nation is that if you are harmed, you can go to court and address those harms. That’s basic stuff, and lawyers play that role. We go to court on behalf of people. I get sued a lot. I sue a lot of people, and get sued a lot — not me, personally, our state — and I never once would have contemplated the idea that I could punish the law firms on the other side of the V from me, or that we could ban them from our buildings and take those kind of punitive actions. It just like wouldn’t have even crossed my mind in a million years. It was so flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional that it had to be fought.
And I think when certain firms sent a message that their business interests were greater than that principle, it was pretty devastating, I think, to the legal community. And I’ve said very publicly that I was quite upset with those decisions. Now, I don’t, I don’t put myself — I’ve never made the kind of money that some of them are making. But you know, that’s not the point here. There are certain things that are more important. And the firms that fought — look, if you’re dealing with a playground bully, if you give them your lunch money, guess what they do the next day: They come back for it. So I’m proud of the fact that we led on three of the four cases and supported the fourth in an amicus supporting those firms that fought, and as you noted, guess what? They kind of moved on.
And it’s not just law firms. This has been part of a authoritarian attack on anyone who stands in their way. So whether it’s law firms or universities or the press or the judiciary or political opponents, they are trying to silence critics, and if we let them, we’re going to wake up and we’re going to say, “What the hell happened to our democracy? It’s gone.” Because at the end of the day, these norms and principles we have, and things that we hold dear, and as lawyers, I think those law dorks of us, we hold these really dear, because we signed up and took an oath to our profession to do these types of things, to go to court on behalf of people, to respect these processes, regardless of how they come out. But at the end of the day, these are just words written on a paper, and the that the rest of us — the 300 plus million people in this country — have said we care so deeply about it that part of this compact we have, part of the freedom we get is we will uphold those norms. We will adhere to them. Well, I think they’re being tested right now. They’re being tested in the court of law, and they’re being tested in the court of public opinion. And I hope the American people are going to respond and say, “You know, we really do care about these.” The polls all show it, but we need to show it both in the courtroom but also in the court of public opinion. You cannot threaten to impeach judges because you don’t like their opinion. You cannot target law firms because they represent interests that are adverse to your administration. You cannot gut universities because they God forbid they allow the freedom of academic speech. These are core principles to who we are as a nation, and you let them go even a little bit, and you’ve lost pretty much everything.
LAW DORK: That’s a sharp, sharp way to close. Do you have anything else that we haven’t talked about that you really are itching to tell people about?
PLATKIN: I like to sort of highlight the fact that we shouldn’t lose hope here. I think it’s very easy, especially for those of us following these cases, it can be easy to fall into despair. There is a lot of dangerous stuff happening. I mean, military going to cities. I mentioned the fact that they were trying to distribute 1000s of machine guns to our our states, against our laws; gutting our education system; getting health care. All these are really damaging things, and they’re scary, but we’ve been through dark moments in our nation before. I think we are in one. I think history will judge it as a dark moment, but we got through those periods in the past because a lot of people, including a lot of lawyers, stood up and fought. So I hope for those of you who are watching and who follow this great substack that you guys don’t give up hope, because while there have been aspects of our profession that have let me down, there have been a whole lot of folks who have showed a lot of courage, and a whole lot of individuals who are standing up when it would be a heck of a lot easier for them not to. And so I try to focus on them. I’m proud of the coalition, that we have people who are really, really selfless, who have come under a lot of fire, and we’ve just got to stay strong and keep standing up for the rule of law. This is not an abstract concept. It matters to people. It matters to the future of this nation.
LAW DORK: Well, thank you so much, and we will, as I said before we went live, we’re only halfway through the week, so I’m sure we will both have more more headlines to come. So thank you, and thanks everybody for joining. And as always, I’ll be posting this with the transcript later today.
