This essay has been slowly moving its way through my brain for months now, but the past week or so has made it truly crystallize for me.

Also, I’m sorry for the lack of output here, things have been utterly bananas at work for the last two or three months and I just literally haven’t had the time to do any sort of deep dives or even try to summarize some of the current Supreme Court term decisions that have come out.

But I need to get this one out, because this week has been an utterly horrific assault on the rule of law, and it feels like this administration might damn well succeed in actually killing all the lawyers.

And I feel like you all need to know just how goddamn bad all this is.

In Shakespeare’s historical play Henry VI - Part II, some of the story revolves around Cade’s Rebellion, which was an actual real-life uprising in 1450 against corrupt administrators following the Hundred Years’ War against France.

In Act IV of the play, Jack Cade and a band of thugs and henchmen are preparing to violently overthrow the government. The scene opens with some of the rebels discussing what their new order will look like, and how they will impose it. They lament how the government doesn’t listen to workmen like them, and how they plan to take their revenge on the elites and artisans. Cade enters with Dick the Butcher and Smith the Weaver, among others.

Cade tells the men how he comes from a working class family. Dick gives an aside explaining that Cade’s father was a bricklayer and mother was a midwife. Cade declares that he is thus “of an honourable house” to the men.

Cade declares to the men that he will make food prices go down (“seven
halfpenny loaves sold for a penny”) and make it a felony to sell low-alcohol beer. Cade promises that everyone will be fed and clothed, and there will in fact be no need for money anymore - all will be prosperous instead of the class systems of England funneling wealth to the already wealthy. The rebels then haul in the Clerk of Chatham, who they then plan to execute because he can read and write.

It is during this that Dick the Butcher says the famous line: “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”

What these characters are talking about, and what Dick the Butcher means by his famous line, is that lawyers, the rule of law, and the educated are what stood in the way of what they viewed as their utopia. They must eliminate these people in order to bring about their workingman class revolution.

Shakespeare abridges the real history a bit, but historical accounts do agree that when Cade’s real-life band entered London, they simply turned into a mob who looted the town (despite Cade’s attempts to stop this), which turned the residents against them. Cade was eventually captured and killed.

In the past week, there are three legal stories that highlight just how utterly past a constitutional crisis we are.

The first is that Trump issued an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 17981 and rounding up about 200 people to send to a for-profit gulag in El Salvador. I don’t use that term lightly. The people being shoved into these prisons are being farmed out for slave labor and treated utterly inhumanely. These people were given no due process at all, only a summary determination by agents that they were “terrorists.” In legal proceedings, the government has admitted that some of them had no criminal record at all, and were detained and hauled off to El Salvador because of tattoos. One of them was a tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon. It was declared to be a gang symbol. In legal proceedings this week, DOJ lawyers took the utterly insane position that the lack of any sort of criminal record or even interactions with police is proof that some these people are dangerous.

The Trump administration set up cameras in advance for the whole thing so they could make promotional videos of these men getting off the planes in chains, shaved, and shoved through hallways. That’s how morally bankrupt this has all become. We no longer even trying to euphemize and sanitize torture like we did in the Bush years; our country is now celebrating it in propaganda videos, with US citizens cheering it in the comments sections.

And it gets worse from there: Trump just today is now indicating that he wants to ship US citizens there under terrorism laws “for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla.”

DC District Court Judge James Boasberg, a conservative jurist2 who has ruled for the Trump administration fairly regularly I need to point out, issued an emergency order enjoining the government from more flights and ordered them to turn around planes in the air. They did not do that. In fact, after that order was issued, a third plane still took off and transferred more people. After Judge Boasberg demanded evidence that the administration was not in violation of his order, the DOJ has dragged their feet and made filings that essentially are “we don’t have to tell you and you can’t tell us what to do.” The DOJ even tried saying at one point “well, yeah, you ordered us out loud not to do those things, but you didn’t enter the written minute order for a little bit.” In any other time, that would be a sanctionably frivolous argument and no lawyer would put their name to it for fear of professional discipline. For it to come from a Department of Justice lawyer is not just stunning, it is further evidence of just how completely rotten things have become.

The Trump administration has continued to try to drag Judge Boasberg on social media and through the White House Press Secretary, and demand his impeachment and removal from the bench for having the audacity to rule against them.

This leads to the second story of the week: Chief Justice John Roberts issuing a very rare public statement regarding the impeachment of judges.

Even before Boasberg’s week with the DOJ, Trump and his surrogates have been increasingly demanding the impeachment of any judge who rules against him, and encouraging violence against the judges’ families. Trump and his staff have been exposing the homes and names of those judges’ families, and Trump has done nothing to ensure their protection. The MAGA mobs were already furious with the Supreme Court - particular Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who they viewed as a traitor to their cause after she has provided a key swing vote in a number of recent cases.3

Roberts’ statement was brief: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

The statement could well be construed as “quit doing this because we’ll rule in your favor when it gets to us,” but it has only escalated the spittle-flecked rage of Trump and his supporters who want to further delegitimize the courts or force them to just rubber stamp their actions.

This is not an accident. This is straight out of the playbook of the authoritarian takeovers of Hungary, Chile, and other countries. Destroying institutions, particularly institutions that could provide any sort of legitimate check on the authoritarian, is one of the very first things these authoritarians do. Having a court system that only ever rules in favor of the autocrat both legitimizes the autocrat (“See? The Court says this is legal!”) and delegitimizes any friction against the autocrat (“they only rule against me because they know I’m right! Don’t listen to them!”) It means the rules are only whatever the autocrat says they are.

Roberts’ statement may feel like some small commentary, but if you know the Court, it’s a terrified scream.

The third story of the week is the utter debasement of law firm Paul Weiss. That’s not the name of a person, it’s the short name for the firm. The full name is Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

This is one of the biggest and most influential law firms in the world, let alone the United States; they employ over 1,000 lawyers and operate in nearly every area of mostly federal practice. When you hear the term Biglaw, this is the kind of firm they’re referring to. The firm is 150 years old next month, first opened in New York City in April 1875.

Trump attacked the firm with an executive order along with several others attacking other law firms that he dislikes. The orders declared these firms to be threats to national security and barred them from all sorts of things, including entering federal buildings such as federal courthouses (I assume you can see why that would be problematic), and revoked all security clearances (needed for certain types of litigation and practice).

The orders are so both outrageous and patently unconstitutional that in any other time, it would be astounding that any credible lawyer wishing to avoid sanctions and discipline would seriously advance such an argument to the contrary.

Another firm, Perkins Coie (pronounced Coo-ee), elected to fight the order and was given such a full temporary restraining order and judicial benchslap against the order that I thoroughly believed the rest of the legal profession would stand together for the rule of law.

But I was wrong.

Paul Weiss agreed to provide $40 million in pro-bono legal work to the Trump Administration - approximately 20,000 to 40,000 billable hours worth of work at their current rates. This is a particular boon to the administration at a time when the administration has fired or had so many lawyers quit the Department of Justice that they have complained in another case that they can’t comply with a judge’s ordered submission timelines due to short staffing. A beleagured DOJ lawyer told a judge several weeks ago that he had not had a day off since the inauguration.

Just to humiliate Paul Weiss further, after the firm and the administration agreed on statement language, Trump went and threw in “oh and they have also agreed to end all their DEI stuff,” which was not part of the deal but is now, apparently.

Why did Trump go after Paul Weiss?

Because an attorney who was previously with the firm, Mark Pomerantz, oversaw an investigation into Trump’s finances as part of the New York state criminal case that later resulted in his felony convictions.4

It’s revenge, pure and simple. Just like Trump promised during his campaign.

Some of the reporters I’ve seen have called this capitulation.

Honestly, I think it’s even worse than that. This not just bending the knee. It’s actively choosing to switch sides. It’s a betrayal of the entire legal profession.

It’s not just Paul Weiss, either.

A top associate at another enormous law firm, Skadden Arps, sent out a company-wide email that said that either they needed to step up to the occasion here or she was quitting.

As of yesterday morning, she was now locked out of her email.

I feel like every day I am telling my friends who ask that this is an unbelievable 15-alarm fire, and yet somehow it continues to get worse.

This newsletter was supposed to be about legal topics in general. It was not meant to be yet another lawyer or legal analyst talking politics and just shit-talking Trump.

Legal vlogger Devin Stone at LegalEagle recently made a comment that resonated with me a lot. “We get a lot of comments that ‘I liked LegalEagle before it was 24/7 Trump bashing.’ Yeah, well, I did too! We don’t do videos on Trump and his administration because we want to; we do it because he’s doing unprecedented legal things basically all the time.”

I want to write about things like admin law and why it’s actually important to you, why you should care about arbitration reform, and making the general law accessible to people. I have nearly two dozen things sitting in a notebook that I want to write about ranging from civil procedure to the rules of evidence. But between time to work on them right now for a variety of reasons, and the fact that every aspect of my profession is being radically upended at the moment, it’s been hard to make any forward progress.

As Stone notes, the most pressing and important legal topics right now are how this administration actively trying to murder the rule of law and the Constitution in new and creative ways.

The first thing authoritarians do is kill all the lawyers.

And the judges.

And the educated people who can articulate why all of this is a very very bad idea.

Authoritarians destroy institutions or force them to bend the knee. (And frankly, they just destroy the cowed institutions later anyways because that was always the goal in the first place. Appeasement only debases you and gets you to the same place later, except now without a fight.)

It is not just dangerous that major law firms are going along with this. We passed dangerous weeks ago. This is the active murder of the rule of law in the United States. It is the end of our constitutional system, and of this democratic experiment in freedom. And it is now being done with the willing participation of the very people who should know better.

The first thing Trump is trying to do is kill all the lawyers.

And these lawyers just agreed to use their own knives and help do the stabbing.