Rule of Law Breakdown?
King v. Constitution
Coming out of law school, I approached becoming a lawyer in much the same way I approached becoming an Air Force intelligence analyst: I was going to serve something larger than myself and defend the Constitution and the rule of law itself. What I have found is a profession like any other where, for most people, the bottom line is the bottom line. I discovered and subsequently reported a firm owner who was knowingly employing and profiting from a woman who was practicing law without a license[1],[2] Both the firm owner and the woman practicing without a license got slaps on the wrist. I’ve had a firm owner tell me point blank that what it is all about for them is the money.
Are we witnessing the collapse of the rule of law in the United States? Why isn’t the American legal profession upholding the values we claim define us?[3] Has the rot always existed? Were those values only held superficially whenever it was convenient? These are just a few questions that have been on my mind lately. I want to explore these kinds of questions in this Substack. But first, I need to sound the alarm and share my current concerns. I have seen firsthand what happens when the rule of law disintegrates and how democracies fall apart. And we’re seeing the same warning signs in the U.S. today.
Since Trump took office for his second term, he has embraced the mantle of President Andrew Jackson in his attacks on the courts. Trump has a long history of attacking jurists for everything from being of “Mexican Heritage” to being appointed by a Democrat and calling them every name in the book.[4] More recently, he has gone even further by seeking to corrupt the practice of law itself.[5] Although it may be apocryphal, President Jackson reportedly responded to a Supreme Court ruling he didn’t like by saying, “(Chief Justice) John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”[6] In a shocking collapse of virtue and a display of cowardice this week, we witnessed one of the most storied and celebrated civil rights law firms bend to Trump’s bullying tactics and kiss the ring of a would-be king.[7] Equally troubling is that this administration is openly disobeying federal court orders and publicly questioning the court’s long-established authority of judicial review, as established by our founding fathers in Marbury v. Madison.[8],[9]
During my six years as an Air Force intelligence analyst, I witnessed in terrifying detail what happens when a judicial system breaks down. The rule of law in Iraq and Afghanistan, and democracy for that matter, never truly took hold despite our numerous efforts over two decades. This was largely due to the corrupt foundations underpinning these countries’ courts. It was well-known that winning a legal dispute often required bribing a judge or tribal leader; this was common practice and simply part of doing business. When most legal rulings are based more on money and power than on established laws or principles, the legal system loses its credibility and any semblance of moral authority. If the rules do not protect a citizen’s interests against greater influences, the all-too-common response of those who have been cheated is to take the law into their own hands. I witnessed countless cases of people who either didn’t receive a fair shake and then turned to violence or preemptively chose to seek their form of revenge, labeling it vigilante justice. This, in turn, spawns a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat violence – the kind that leads to blood feuds that don’t end well, if at all. This is how democracies fall. Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter said, “Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling.”
In Iraq, for example, the Kurds and Shias faced systematic abuse from Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party, which was composed entirely of Sunnis. These tribal identities were what truly mattered to the Iraqis. Referring to them as Iraqis has always been somewhat of a misnomer since national identity held little significance for them. After Saddam was overthrown, the Shias, who made up most of the population, took control of the government with our assistance. Instead of turning over a new leaf, they regularly treated the Sunnis as they had been treated when the roles were reversed. As their corrupt courts continued, “justice” was understood as Thrasymachus envisioned it: “might makes right,” and the people lived in the state of nature that Hobbes described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Here in the U.S., we like to believe that, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of our society.” This includes the moral catastrophes of decisions such as Dred Scott[10], Korematsu[11], Plessy v. Ferguson[12], Bush v. Gore,[13] and, yes, the Dobbs decision.[14] It also encompasses our moral triumphs like Brown v. Board,[15] New York Times v. Sullivan,[16] Terry v. Ohio,[17] U.S. v. Nixon,[18] Miranda v. Arizona,[19] Gideon v. Wainwright,[20] and Roe v. Wade.[21] If you are not familiar with each one of these cases, I encourage you to read and study them –I’ve provided links in the footnotes. Our country’s story also includes the Jim Crow South, which fought tooth and nail against reconstruction and used the 13th Amendment to continue enslaving millions of black people.
My point is that we have reason to believe in and be proud of the moral progress of American jurisprudence. But we cannot be naïve to the struggles that brought us here. Understanding history and context is essential before declaring that this time is different. This is certainly not the first constitutional crisis we have encountered. President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus – the most fundamental freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. The basis of his wealth is built on disenfranchising and discriminating against minorities in housing.[22] Not only that, but we also concurrently found ourselves with a completely subservient Congress and a feckless Supreme Court. Our checks and balances are in shambles. Just yesterday, the Speaker of the House openly discussed dissolving the Federal Courts because of certain rulings he opposes.[23]
We are experiencing the worst factional divide since the Civil War. If you listen closely, Trump and his supporters reveal their true priorities – to own and harm the libs. Once you recognize this as their primary motivation, their attacks on the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, USAID, and, importantly, civil rights law firms are easily seen as strikes against perceived liberal strongholds. This continues the four decades of assault the right has waged on the judiciary, culminating in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This kind of factional warfare is precisely what James Madison warned against in Federalist Paper No. 10. It is also exactly what President Abraham Lincoln referred to when he said, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
The Dobbs decision was the ultimate legal expression of might makes right and the exercise of raw political power to discard established law that at least three of the Justices swore to leave intact during their confirmation hearings. The “legal reasoning” behind the decision was the hobgoblin of little minds. It was so pathetically flawed that it was impossible to overlook the subtext: this is not about the law or principled legal reasoning. If it were, there would be much stronger arguments backing it. In fact, many liberal and progressive constitutional scholars believe that Roe reached the right conclusion but for the wrong reasons. Justice Alito, the primary author of the Dobbs decision, could have embraced some of those valid legal critiques. Instead, the conservatives chose not to even attempt an intellectually respectable, let alone honest, argument. And why should they? This is and has always been about political power – pure and simple. They stole a Supreme Court seat and now dominate the court 6-3. As Justice Sotomayor remarked then, the Court may not survive this political stench.
Then came the Roberts Court decision to declare Trump a king. [24],[25] The idea that a President has absolute criminal immunity for any “official acts” is patently absurd for many reasons, not the least of which is that it severely undermines the Supreme Court’s ability to check the executive. For some, this was shocking; however, for those of us who monitor the Federalist Society’s thoughts and actions, this did not come out of nowhere. The legal reasoning on the right has long included a strain known as the “Unitary Executive Theory,” which posits, among many other (terrifying) things, that the Executive branch should be essentially free from oversight by the Supreme Court and Congress. And as if that weren’t enough, the Court did everything possible to ensure that Trump never went to trial for his crimes before the election. Is it any wonder, then, that the Supreme Court’s approval rating has reached a historic low of 38%?
Against this backdrop, the cowardly decision of the Paul Weiss law firm to protect their bottom line by sacrificing their virtue and bowing to Trump’s demands is a gut punch. The administration targets law firms like Paul Weiss, Covington & Burling, Jenner & Block, and Perkins Coie for petty political reasons, such as representing former special counsel Jack Smith and Hillary Clinton or suing January 6th insurrectionists.[26] They threatened to cancel the government contracts for all these law firms' clients and revoke their lawyers’ security clearances. The Paul Weiss law firm has capitulated and agreed to play by Trump’s rules to avoid this fight. Reportedly, when their lawyers started reaching out to their colleagues at other firms to warn them that they were being targeted and create a unified front, those same colleagues turned around and started trying to poach Paul Weiss’s clients and rainmaking attorneys, which no doubt heavily factored into the decision to cave.
It is essential to the rule of law that lawyers are free and encouraged to represent politically unpopular individuals and positions zealously (at least when there are legitimate legal arguments to be made). This harkens back to before our country’s founding, when future President John Adams represented and successfully defended the British soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre, much to the anger and dismay of Samuel Adams and his revolutionary supporters. John Adams believed at the time that it was imperative to demonstrate that the people of Boston could not only govern themselves but also uphold the principled rule of law, contrasting this with the King’s display of pure power as he trampled their rights as English subjects. History has lauded the actions of John Adams and his values of due process, the right to a fair trial, and zealous advocacy in an adversarial legal system, now enshrined in our Constitution. Of course, if one’s objective is to rule as a dictator, undermining both judges and litigators simultaneously makes sense. The most elegant way to circumvent unfavorable judicial rulings is to prevent legal actions from ever being initiated.
As lawyers in America, we have two important roles: officer of the court and zealous advocate. We also learn that when these roles conflict, the former must take precedence over the latter – that our duties as zealous advocates must yield to our obligations as court officers. Our primary loyalty must be to the Constitution, upholding and advancing the rule of law. A prime example of a lawyer who violated this principle is Rudy Giuliani, who was disbarred for this very reason.[27] In providing zealous advocacy for his client, Donald Trump, Rudy made arguments that he knew had no basis in law or fact.
Those of us with an active bar card are, in a very real sense, members of the third coequal branch of government, which comes with extraordinary powers and responsibilities. It is for this reason that the behavior of the lawyers who attempted to poach Paul Weiss’s clients and the decision of the firm’s managing equity partners to capitulate to Trump’s demands is so disappointing and galling. Their actions represent a direct betrayal of their duties as court officers. One of the gravest aspects of this is the unavoidable conflict of interest created for these firms by Trump’s actions – specifically, the threat to cancel all government contracts of the firms' clients. The firms' duties and obligations, as well as their financial interests, are now fundamentally at odds with their clients' financial interests in maintaining their government contracts. While we can and should empathize with the lawyers placed in this terrible position, it does not excuse their decision to betray their duties and obligations to the rule of law.
I cannot express how many speeches I’ve endured from lawyers extolling the virtues of our profession, loudly proclaiming their devotion to providing pro bono hours and significant financial donations for public interest law, as if they were doing it purely out of the goodness of their hearts. There are genuine heroes in my profession, but they tend not to behave like the Pharisees who go around telling people how virtuous they are and putting on public performances of piety. The reality is that there are indeed many lawyers who don’t give a damn about their duties and obligations as officers of the court, and there are even more who may nominally believe in them, but when push comes to shove, they will choose the path of least resistance. There is a well-known essay by Dorothy Thompson, the first journalist expelled from the Third Reich. [28] In the piece, she illustrates how to engage in a “macabre parlor game” of speculating “who in a showdown would go Nazi.” For the lawyers at these big firms, the rubber is meeting the road, revealing who they truly are and what they really value. I’m not accusing them of going Nazi quite yet, but you can see the slippery slope they are going down, and they may be chameleons showing their true colors.
Big firms like these are uniquely suited to take on large pro bono public interest projects because of the vast resources that come with their size and the financial ability to build pro bono hours into associate attorneys’ annual billing requirements. Removing these pro bono hours is particularly concerning because it can potentially have a chilling effect on all big law firms engaging in crucial public interest work.
My experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan largely inspired my decision to pursue a vocation in law rather than merely viewing it as just another profession. There is a significant distinction between adhering to the letter of the law and embracing its spirit. The law does not always align with fairness or justice, and something being legal does not necessarily equate to being ethical, moral, or free from corruption. Yet, despite these complexities, I maintain my belief in the nobility of being a lawyer in the pursuit of justice. It has often been observed, even by President Reagan, that while the Soviet Union’s constitution enshrined ideals and rights that were more utopian, these ideals remained ultimately meaningless and unfulfilled, paying allegiance to the rule of man instead of the rule of law itself.
No matter how well crafted, the law is never self-executing or sufficient. Its true value lies in our collective commitment to uphold and fulfill our duties and obligations to deliver the justice we promise or, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., to cash our checks. This is why the decision of any law firm to cave is so troubling and alarming. As James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” It’s time for many of my fellow lawyers to face themselves in the mirror. It is up to all of us to ask what we are doing for our country in this clear and present danger. If nothing else, it is now up to these law firms to oppose any executive orders seeking to silence or punish them for who they represent or the issues they bring before our courts.
My name is Thomas M. Just and I am just asking questions.
[1] https://www.kvue.com/article/news/investigations/defenders/fake-lawyer-sentenced-nichole-humes-avoids-jail-hays-county/269-332f7384-2464-4774-bf6a-8a76faabb122
[2] https://www.kvue.com/article/news/investigations/defenders/dorothy-lawrence-attorney-hays-county/269-f9292316-8f07-4df7-9633-a7a79a6c5d70
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/business/paul-weiss-trump-deal.html
[4] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/his-own-words-presidents-attacks-courts
[5] https://www.msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/trump-paul-weiss-perkins-coie-rule-law-rcna197524
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/business/paul-weiss-trump-reaction.html
[8] https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-admin-ignores-judges-order-bring-deportation-planes/story?id=119857181
[9] For those unaware, Marbury v. Madison is perhaps the most significant Supreme Court decision ever. It established the judicial branch as a truly coequal branch by affirming the Court’s power to review legislation to determine whether it complies with the Constitution, thereby checking both the legislature and the executive.
[10] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/60us393
[11] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/323us214
[12] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/163us537
[13] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2000/00-949
[14] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2021/19-1392
[15] https://www.oyez.org/cases/brown-v-board-of-education
[16] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/39
[17] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1967/67
[18] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1973/73-1766
[19] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1965/759
[20] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1962/155
[21] https://www.oyez.org/cases/1971/70-18
[22] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html
[23] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-floats-eliminating-federal-courts-rcna197986
[24] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/23-939
[25] https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/23-719
[26] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/addressing-risks-from-jenner-block/
[27] https://apnews.com/article/rudy-giuliani-disbarred-dc-washington-2020-election-trump-new-york-f555f010338fddbac0b0cbeb4a11d73d
[28] https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/