What Does It Mean to Be a Lawyer in a Lawless Time?
Banding together is the only way we can stop this.
As an attorney, a question has been stuck in my head ever since Donald Trump’s reelection. This question and its implications have only become louder since Trump took office and immediately confirmed all of my worst fears by embarking on an onslaught of flagrantly unconstitutional executive orders, illegal impoundments of Congressionally-allocated funds, attempts to dismantle agencies created by acts of Congress via executive fiat, contemptuous and lawless refusal to comply with court orders, and most disturbingly, violations of the Constitutionally-enshrined rights of individuals to due process and the security of their persons. Soon after that, events in my own life made it necessary for me to personally confront this question. And now because of May 1st, a day observed annually by the legal profession as Law Day, it has become so loud that it is impossible for anyone in the profession to ignore: What does it mean to be a lawyer in a time of lawlessness and growing authoritarianism, and what does this moment demand of us?
The first time I personally had to confront this new reality was in my immigration pro-bono work. Prior to Trump taking office, even though my specialization was commercial litigation, I could answer most immigration-related questions posed to me; it was enough to dispense basic information relating to immigration law issues and direct helpline callers to more specialized legal resources as needed. After Trump took office, however, this dynamic changed.
In fact, I can trace my first personal encounter with this new world of law without law to a single question in early February 2025: “Would it be safe for my friend who is in the country on asylum status to get a New York state driver’s license?” I remember all the different factors that went through my head: that New York had a state law explicitly protecting that kind of information, but then also that the administration seemed intent to do whatever it wanted on immigration without regard to law and about the recent seizures of all kinds of governmental data by DOGE — might it be better for such a record to just not be made in the first place? But more than any of these thoughts, I remember a feeling of impotence.
As someone who is not an immigration lawyer, it was not unusual to receive questions that I could not immediately answer and had to direct on to a career public interest attorney, but this was something new: a legal question that simply did not have an answer because appropriate guidance depended on the future actions of an administration intent to act outside the bounds of law. I ended up saying something hedgy like, “While New York state law protects information provided to the DMV, at present the situation with immigration law at the federal level is very fluid and unpredictable, so it would be very difficult to be sure how much protection those laws would provide in practice.” This was not an inaccurate analysis, but I still wonder, in retrospect, if it would have been better if I had just flatly answered, “No.” But this is part and parcel of a world of legal practice without law — where trying to predict the next moves of an arbitrary state replaces definitive judgments about codified and consistently enforced rules, and providing actionable advice is virtually impossible.
A few weeks later, I went on vacation abroad. It was at the end of that vacation, while in Italy, that I found out via the administration’s latest executive order that, because of where I worked, I was now apparently regarded as a presumptive threat to national security. I was barred from entering federal courthouses and from future government employment without waiver letters from the agency head and Russell Vought. Having no desire to enter government service in the near future (for many reasons) and recognizing this order for the flagrantly unconstitutional nonsense that it was, I assumed my firm would file suit on Monday to enjoin enforcement of the executive order as soon as possible and minimize disruption to business, and even remember joking about it on WhatsApp with a friend from law school while walking around central Milan.
I flew back to the US and returned to work again the next Monday. I kept checking my work email and the news for a legal filing by my firm — it never came. By the end of the day, I began suspecting the worst. On Thursday, those fears were confirmed by a firmwide email announcing that, instead of fighting, my firm had cut a deal with the administration. The firm’s leadership had acquiesced to an order that they knew had no legal basis because they feared further illegal retaliation against firm clients by administrative agencies would make retaining clients of the firm’s highly lucrative transactional practices untenable. In a firmwide email, the managing partner said that the firm had wanted to fight back, but ultimately decided to cut a deal after, instead of supporting them, other firms aggressively pursued their partners and clients, and this may well be true. But it’s no excuse. Other firms were faced with similar situations and reached different decisions, even at the cost of losing clients.
Since my firm’s capitulation, I have been forced to grapple with questions of a kind that few lawyers in this country’s history have had to face (though likely all too many in the history of others). What does it mean to be someone who honors the attorney’s sworn oath to “support the Constitution of the United States?”
But before you get any misconceptions about me, I’m not one of the brave ones. I did not flambé my firm in a scathing open letter or jump headfirst without a backup plan into a bad job market and an oncoming recession. I quietly updated my resume and began applying for positions at firms and organizations that I wouldn’t be ashamed to tell a stranger I worked for.
In the interim, until I secure a new position, I’ve tried to create red lines to protect myself from compromising my values:
I will not do any work in fulfillment of the pro-bono quota agreed between the firm and the Trump administration, even if the work is legitimate pro-bono work for an organization freely chosen by the firm. If asked to do so, I will decline, and if compelled to do so, I will resign;
If at any point the firm is coerced by the government into taking on specific “pro-bono” work to advance the policies or interests of the administration (e.g., the coal industry, negotiating trade deals, defending police departments, etc.), I will resign immediately even if I have no personal involvement — because at the point when the government can force a firm to take on new clients and cases, it can no longer guarantee existing clients non-conflicted representation and the ethical practice of law becomes impossible.
The truth of the matter is it’s hard to know just what it means to “support the Constitution of the United States.” Clearly what my firm’s partners decided wasn’t it — but how far should I go to meet that obligation? How much should I be willing to sacrifice? Before January 20, 2025, it was easy to understand what fulfilling the ethical and societal responsibilities of the legal profession meant in the United States. There were ethics opinions from your bar association, recommended pro-bono hours targets, and things like that. It isn’t anymore.
But the more I think about it, the more I wonder just how unique questions like these are to members of the legal profession. I suspect that people of conscience all over this country who love democracy may be asking themselves the same questions: Is what I’m doing enough? Am I being the kind of person I can live with? What are my lines? Maybe the only actual difference is that lawyers — with the powers society has afforded our profession and having the ear of the only branch of government that continues to consistently push back against the administration’s drumbeat of unconstitutional actions — are able to oppose the creeping authoritarianism afflicting our country in ways that others cannot.
I believe that with that greater ability comes a responsibility to fight back. So, this Law Day, I gathered in Foley Square with other attorneys to support a world where the oaths we reaffirmed on Thursday still have meaning. Because, amid the rapid tide of events, the only way to hold our ground is to join with others and define where we stand; if we don’t, we are sure to be swept away.
This article was written by B, an anonymous member of 50501 NY. This is not an official statement of the 50501 movement.
Thumbnail illustration by: Olivier Heiligers
My lawyer Son is caught in a T state dilemna. He’s in agony. I appreciate your sharing