The American legal profession has declared war on the Trump administration.
The American Bar Association, the typically nonpartisan and reserved professional voice of the legal trade, is suing nearly every top federal government official to fight what it calls President Donald Trump’s “deliberate policy designed to intimidate and coerce law firms and lawyers” that challenge his policies.
“President Trump now threatens to destroy the same attribute that John Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville recognized as essential to the rule of law in the early days of our Republic: the independence of the American bar,” read the 93-page federal lawsuit filed Monday in Chicago.
“Today,” it continues, “the American legal profession faces a challenge that is different from all that has come before. It is unprecedented and uniquely dangerous to the rule of law.”
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The legal complaint is the largest counterstrike to date against Trump’s politically driven feud with many of the nation’s largest law firms, which he has spent months targeting with punishing executive orders. The president has claimed the authority to bar attorneys from federal buildings, cut them off from government contracts and yank away security clearances.
Notably, the professional organization selected one of those targeted firms, Susman Godfrey, to file the lawsuit.
The White House called the ABA’s suit “frivolous” in a statement shared with NOTUS.
“The President has always had discretion over which contracts the government enters into and who receives security clearances,” White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields wrote in an email. “His exercise of these core executive functions cannot be dictated by the ABA, a private organization, or the courts. The Administration looks forward to ultimate victory on this issue.”
Legal scholars and pro-democracy experts have warned that the flurry of these executive orders is meant to preemptively silence public dissent to Trump’s militarized immigration crackdown and attack on progressive civil rights causes, scaring law firms away from taking on clients who could block key White House policies via legal challenges.
The lawsuit argues that Trump already managed to “coerce” nine law firms “into abandoning representations, speech, and other conduct the president dislikes” — as well as pressuring them into providing free legal services.
When Trump signed an executive order in April seeking to shield police nationwide from accountability for abusive behavior, he specifically directed the attorney general to employ “the use of private-sector pro bono assistance for such law enforcement officers.”
The ABA sued the Trump administration for violating the First Amendment’s rights to free speech and petition the government, engaging in viewpoint discrimination and what it called “ultra vires” presidential action that went beyond the scope of the law.
The lawsuit builds on what’s already become a winning track record for law firms that challenge these kinds of executive orders. Several judges have struck down the presidential actions as unconstitutional.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in the District of Columbia issued a 73-page order balking at the vindictive nature of the executive orders.
“The cornerstone of the American system of justice is an independent judiciary and an independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting. The Founding Fathers knew this!” he wrote.
Weeks earlier, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell concluded that the White House was violating Fifth and Sixth amendment rights that protect people’s ability to seek their own counsel and First Amendment right of free association.
“This action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’” she wrote.
The ABA’s lawsuit also adopted a strategy that it plucked from previous legal challenges: suing every corner of the federal government to make sure that judicial orders are followed across the board.
It’s a lesson the ABA picked up from Perkins Coie, another firm that sued the Trump administration to fend off this kind of White House pressure campaign. That other lawsuit initially targeted half a dozen agencies and top officials, primarily focusing on the ones in a position to block contracts, access to federal buildings and deliver security clearances. But when Justice Department lawyers hinted in court that any agencies not specifically named in a lawsuit wouldn’t have to abide by a judge’s order blocking the crackdown, Perkins Coie amended its complaint by suing dozens of others — with a defendant list that stretched on for 40 pages, a move that generated humor and cheers across the legal field.
The ABA’s lawsuit similarly hits just about the entire Trump cabinet, listing everything from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Defense and every top official from Attorney General Pam Bondi to FBI Director Kash Patel.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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