SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
rule of law
Making Big Money But Losing Your Soul: The Shame of the Legal Titans
Every lawyer takes an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. To abandon that pledge at this moment, when the Constitution is in mortal danger, is shameful.
Apr 11, 2025
As part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s seemingly endless journey on the Good Ship Retribution, he has, as widely reported, now fired shots across the bow of a number of law firms. Their “crime” has been having the audacity to employ lawyers Trump dislikes or representing people or causes he dislikes. The sanctions he wants to enforce are significant, including barring the offending firms’ attorneys from receiving federal contracts, striping them of security clearances, and even barring them from entering federal buildings. And this is in addition to launching federal investigations into their DEI policies.
Because, after all, what could be worse than diversity, equity, and inclusion?
The law firms Trump is attacking are, at least mostly, huge operations, the type of firms that are collectively known as “Big Law.” While some of these firms are fighting back, many have chosen to cut a deal. In other words, they’ve caved. Large firms that have folded include Milbank, Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher. The “honor” of being regarded as the leader of the pack, however, goes to Paul Weiss, as the first to cave.
While earning a living is important, being a lawyer is about much more than money.
As an attorney practicing in a small law firm in Wichita, Kansas, I have little in common with lawyers working in Big Law firms. A Paul Weiss lawyer and I are both attorneys, but we practice in different worlds. For 40 years I have defended healthcare providers in malpractice cases. These lawsuits sometimes involve millions of dollars. That’s chicken feed to these guys. The top Big Law litigators will at times handle litigation involving hundreds of millions of dollars or even more, while, at the same time, the firm’s business lawyers represent corporations in transactions involving multiple billions of dollars.
These Big Law firms are immense. Paul Weiss has over 1,000 lawyers.
My firm has six, and that includes one who is basically retired.
Top partners in Big Law firms like Paul Weiss can charge $2,400 an hour or more.
My usual billing rate is less than a tenth of that number.
The annual pay last year for an equity partner in Paul Weiss was $7.5 million.
My pay is, shall we say, somewhat lower.
A true multinational firm, Paul Weiss has offices located from Asia to Europe and their home base in North America, with offices in both the U.S. and Canada.
My firm has just the one office and none of us have practiced law outside the United States. But I have visited Canada a few times.
I do, however, have one thing in common with Big Law attorneys. We all took the same oath to support and defend the Constitution which, by definition, includes supporting and defending the Rule of Law.
Very few lawyers specialize in constitutional law or professional ethics. Most of us practice in areas like divorce cases (family law), defending or prosecuting criminal cases (criminal law), trying civil lawsuits (trial lawyers), probating wills (estate practice), and representing corporations in business transactions (business law). Working in these specialized areas of the law there’s little occasion to think deeply about concepts like defending the Constitution. But the oath, and the lawyer’s obligation to follow it, is always there.
Law is a profession, but also a business—and, as they say, the business of business is business—in other words, making money. And there is nothing wrong with this. EMS providers save lives, but they also have bills to pay. The need to pay bills is just as true for lawyers. But while earning a living is important, being a lawyer is about much more than money.
Those leaders of Big Law, still refusing to vigorously defend or even speak out in support of the Rule of Law, need to consider what matters most to them. What they would most want to be remembered for—maximizing profit or defending freedom?
Defending the Constitution when, and if, the need arises must always come first. This is true even when doing so is painful, which at times it can be. As a publication of the American Bar Association has said, lawyers “are obligated to act in support of the U.S. Constitution in all situations, especially where it’s the hardest for you.”
Many lawyers have gone through an entire career never having to face an issue like this. But those of us practicing today aren’t that lucky. We live in a time when the survival of the Constitution and the Rule of Law are in the greatest jeopardy since the Civil War. The American people decided to give the staggering power of the presidency to a man who has never tried to conceal his hunger for absolute power, nor his love of cruelty.
Making matters worse, the separation of powers, which is supposed to protect us from presidential overreach, has, in the words of Don McLean, caught the first train to the coast. Congress is moribund. The Supreme Court hasn’t clearly spoken yet. There is reason for concern, given the majority’s far-right ideology, as to how they will rule when the time comes. And even if the Supreme Court rules against Trump he may refuse to accept it, creating a constitutional crisis.
To be honest, I can live with a constitutional crisis. What scares me more is if there isn’t one. That when the general public is finally forced to face up to Trump’s authoritarian agenda, people will yawn and go about their lives. And why wouldn’t they, given the example set by institutions like Columbia University caving to Trump’s extortion/ And the same goes for much of Big Law—choosing the easy route of ignoring their oath to keep the cash flowing into the firm accounts.
Big Law does have much to lose if they fight. Crossing Trump has the potential of creating a serious crimp in their cash flow. Not only would they be risking government business, but they would face a real risk of losing major corporate clients—their biggest cash cow. Corporations will have no problem recognizing that if they continue to retain lawyers who are on Trump’s enemies list, they will face a significant risk that Trump will sic MAGA on them, which could seriously damage their business. If Columbia University and Big Law are willing to kiss Trump’s ring, can anyone doubt that for-profit corporations will do the same?
So yes, Big Law has much to lose. But realistically we aren’t talking about closing the doors of a firm. The worst-case scenario is probably something like equity partners at Paul Weiss only taking home $4 million a year for a few years instead of $7.5 million. But the fact remains, they took an oath. This is part of the quid pro quo inherent in becoming a lawyer. You are allowed to practice your profession, but to do so you must first take an oath accepting the obligation to support and defend the Constitution. This is a duty all lawyers share, whether they work in big firms, small firms, corporate legal departments, the government, or a nonprofit entity. It’s a big part of what defines us.
To abandon that pledge at this moment, when the Constitution is in mortal danger, is shameful. Those leaders of Big Law, still refusing to vigorously defend or even speak out in support of the Rule of Law, need to consider what matters most to them. What they would most want to be remembered for—maximizing profit or defending freedom?
It shouldn’t be a hard decision.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Dehumanization and Protest: Miami's Krome Detention Center and Beyond
Demonstrators from Miami to Tacoma support immigrants detained by ICE.
Apr 09, 2025
"Please make this go viral. . . . Please help us."
Those are the words of Osiriss Azahael Vázquez Martínez in video messages he was able to record from the overcrowded Krome detention center two weeks ago. Vázquez Martínez, 45, a construction worker, lived in the United States for a decade and "was arrested [in February] for driving without a license on his way home from work," the Miami Herald reported.
Crouching under a table in what is apparently a waiting area, Vázquez Martínez knew his message was from a place we might not even know about. "This is happening right now in the Krome detention center in Miami, Florida," he says in Spanish. "We are practically kidnapped."
Thirty-five years ago, I taught English at Krome. The photo accompanying Vázquez Martínez's story—an exterior view of Building 8, the men's "dormitory"—reminded me of how remote the detention compound seemed when I would drive home after my classes, from the edge of the Everglades back to Miami Beach.
"You're brainwashed over there [to think] 'These are all scumbag inmates,'" he said.
Teachers worked at Krome back then through a Dade County Public Schools contract with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, predecessor to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The detainees, our students, came from around the world, though most were Haitian asylum-seekers. They were frustrated and bored. They were also quiet, calm, and appreciative of any small efforts the teachers made to help.
So it was surprising when Krome guards, also known as detention officers, warned us to be careful. Informally and at "briefings," they told us the detainees were dangerous, even though we were used to moving freely through the common areas, registering students, and sitting with them to study or talk. Guards also asked us teachers to act as their "spies." When I brought in copies of the Miami Herald to use for English lessons, guards told us not to let detainees see newspapers. Later I'd understand the reason.
Out of sight, Krome guards would beat men regularly and force women to trade sex for the promise of getting out. The Herald had started reporting on all of this, even as the immigration agency barred its reporters from the detention center. Miami, and much of the country, would learn about these practices—they weren't aberrations—from a teacher who had been working at Krome for years and finally decided she had to speak out about what the detained women had been telling her (Miami Herald, 4/11/1990).
As I started to research detention further, I was able to interview a former Krome guard who explained how the officers were conditioned to view all immigrants as criminals, and how this, in their minds, justified the brutality. "You're brainwashed over there [to think] 'These are all scumbag inmates,'" he said.
The ex-guard told me that his fellow guards, not the detainees, were the dangerous ones. He called his colleagues "cop wannabes" and said, "I tell you from experience. I was going, 'Wow, I got a badge and a gun now.'" The more experienced officers encouraged him to lock detainees in the bathroom for hours at a time, just to let them know who had the power, and he did it.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance didn't invent anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence. Brutality and racism have always been part of the immigration enforcement regime. But the longstanding principles of U.S.detention and deportation policy—dehumanization of the immigrants and unchecked power for their guards and deporters—have metastasized under the Trump-Vance plan.
Our government now glorifies and celebrates the humiliation and violence, as it has in the U.S.-El Salvador collaboration on what historian Timothy Snyder has called a propaganda film worthy of the 1930s.
In 1990, the "average daily population" of immigrant detainees in the United States was about 5,000. On March 23 of this year there were 47,892 people acknowledged to be in ICE custody.
Last year the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) randomly chose 5 out of 44 available videos of use-of-force incidents at Krome from a given six-month period. Four of the five videos depicted the use of pepper spray by guards against detainees who were already restrained or who were offering no resistance at all.
DHS's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (OCRCL) also investigated Krome, reporting on "concerns related to inappropriate use of force and the impact on the mental health of the noncitizens involved with the incidents." Congress formed OCRCL during the post-9/11 Bush administration in response to, among other things, "widespread illegal and abusive detention of Muslim and Asian immigrants." The Trump administration has eliminated this and other watchdog agencies and removed OCRCL documentation from the agency website. (At least some of the material has been preserved at the Wayback Machine.)
A DHS spokesperson said that government oversight has "obstructed immigration enforcement." In other words, the law itself is an obstruction, and "enforcement" is a synonym for lawlessness.
This plays out in large and small ways at Krome and elsewhere.
At Krome, a reporter from Reason was barred by an "ICE supervisor" from observing public court hearings. At the Batavia detention center in New York State, guards are illegally opening and copying detainees' legal mail.
ICE's "administrative detainees" are also being incarcerated in federal prisons, although the government refuses to say which prisons or how many prisoners. In this way the Bureau of Prisons can help keep the immigrants away from their lawyers.
Back in 1998, the officer-in-charge at Krome said "that the problem was that some officers did not want to accept the fact that detainees were human beings." Last month USA Today reported that women held briefly at Krome, which is an all-male facility now, were chained for hours on a bus without bathroom access. Guards told them to urinate and defecate on the floor, and some had no other choice.
Detainees at ICE's Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico told USA Today they staged a "sit-in" because they wanted to see deportation officers or a judge. Some had been held for seven or eight months. Even if they wanted to leave the U.S. voluntarily, they couldn't do so. One of the nonviolent protesters, Irrael Arzuaga-Milanes, said he was punished with four days of solitary confinement. (The ACLU has just obtained ICE documents, for which it had to sue, concerning ICE policies on solitary. ICE has used this punishment as a form of torture, according to the United Nations.)
There will be more protests by detainees against wrongful detentions, illegal deportations, overcrowding, and mistreatment. ICE detention guards, private-prison contractors, and county jails holding ICE detainees will respond with the excessive force that the administration actively encourages. And not only encourages: Our government now glorifies and celebrates the humiliation and violence, as it has in the U.S.-El Salvador collaboration on what historian Timothy Snyder has called a propaganda film worthy of the 1930s.
There's a small bit of good news here. A day after the Herald reported on conditions at Krome, 200 protesters rallied outside that immigration prison. Also in recent weeks:
- In Washington State, labor unions protested outside ICE's Northwest detention center to support people locked inside;
- In North Carolina, women protested the arrests of their husbands (stopped based on lies by law enforcement) who were then sent down to Krome;
- In New Jersey, protesters opposed the planned reopening of the Delaney Hall detention center to be operated by the GEO Group, while Newark city inspectors have reportedly been barred from entering the detention center construction site; and
- In Rhode Island, protesters outside the Wyatt Detention Facility demanded the release of their immigrant neighbors.
There are almost 200 of these "facilities"—that we know of—across the United States, as well in Guam and the North Mariana Islands, used by ICE to hold immigrant prisoners as of late 2024. The prisoners are in ICE's "processing centers," in county jails, and (the overwhelming majority) in private prisons. There are also 25 ICE field offices, as well as ICE "check-in locations" around the country.
There's room outside all of them for lawful protests and demonstrations against the lawlessness and inhumanity inside.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Harvard Law School Dean's Deafening and Dangerous Silence
What does a tyrannical president like Donald Trump have to fear from a law school leader like this? It seems like the answer is clear: not very much to fear at all.
Apr 06, 2025
Tyrant Donald Trump, mega-violator of federal laws Wrecking America, has targeted Harvard University. Trump illegally threatens to cancel $9 billion in committed grants and contracts. One would think that the mighty Harvard Law School – loaded with professors having litigation and federal government experience – would be the vanguard of resistance and counterattack against the critical extortions of Trump, the fascistic dictator.
Wrong!
The Law School is under the control of the University’s Board of Overseers and the University Administration. This exalted edifice of higher education is quivering with fright and bending to the vicious Trumpsters instead of fighting back in the courts and enlisting their vast influential alumni. Such a Law School would have turned a deaf ear to Paul Revere’s Ride on the 18th of April in ’75.
I learned this firsthand as an alumnus of the Law School when I co-sponsored the first VIGOROUS PUBLIC INTEREST LAW DAY on April 1, 2025.
Here is the story in brief. Last December Interim Dean John Goldberg returned my call for a substantial conversation on the need to address the various forms of corporate power and corporate coercion over the rule of law. As a former Tort Professor (tort law deals with wrongful injuries) his awareness of corporate abuses was greater than his less learned predecessors.
I mentioned articles written by me for the Harvard Law Record in recent years that urged more attention by the Harvard Law School to the systemic lawlessness of these corporate supremacists along with more study of congressional surrender to the Executive Branch. He welcomed me sending materials on these topics and said he would read them over the Holidays and we would have another conversation.
A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.
That was the last time I ever heard from him. Since that conversation came the second inauguration of Donald Trump and his tactics of winning through criminal intimidation. Many emails, voicemails, and requests in January and February through the Dean’s polite secretary for us to speak went completely unanswered.
Come March, my calls and emails became focused on informing him about the Vigorous Public Interest Law Day events, with speakers of great distinction for their contributions to a more just society. I wanted to invite him to greet the assembly and urge students and faculty to be part of this rare event at the heavily corporatized law school. After all the rule of law was under wholesale destruction because of Trump’s illegal, enforced executive orders.
No answers from his Deanship. Instead, the feedback from students revealed evidence of their anxiety, dread, and fear. Especially by foreign students and supporters of Palestinian rights against U.S. funding and co-belligerent support of Netanyahu’s mass murder genocide in Gaza. As April 1st neared, I sensed that the two large reserved lecture rooms would be too large.
What I saw unfolding was a quiet boycott, almost all the contacted faculty went incommunicado and those that showed some enthusiasm ended up being strange no-shows. The Law School has numerous student associations and over thirty legal clinics run by full-time directors. Students and staff overwhelmingly failed to attend.
It’s not that our organizers, a full-time person and several stalwart students, didn’t publicize these sterling presentations – some in-person and some by Zoom. There were posters and handouts everywhere. Emails, telephone calls, meetings, and word-of-mouth efforts were substantive. Burritos were provided as a free lunch. Requests to Dean Goldberg to meet with the speakers (mostly Harvard law alumni) with hundreds of experience years of pursuing and achieving justice went unanswered. The speakers wanted to share their views with him and the assistant deans as to how best to have the curricula, extracurricular experience, and admission criteria better reflect the law school’s own declared mission: “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.”
Sadly, there was not even the courtesy of a response from his Deanship.
What explains this crude and rude rebuff, unlike how the Administration lays out the red carpet for rich corporate alumni from Wall Street and other plutocratic venues?
The Law School is controlled by the overall University policy to shy from challenging Trump and demonstrate flexibility. Harvard retained Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with close ties to Trump. Astonishingly, the Harvard administration ignored antisemitism against the Palestinian slaughter, with U.S. tax dollars and military support in violation of the Leahy Law, instead adopting a definition of antisemitism closer to Netanyahu’s racist state coverup. Two leaders of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies were discharged. This led the New York Times to report that: “To some faculty members, the move was more evidence that Harvard was capitulating at a moment of creeping authoritarianism.”
The Law School is part of this capitulation, notwithstanding its historical knowledge that yielding to newly installed tyrants emboldens their tyranny to move against other universities and colleges.
So here is what poor, frightened Dean Goldberg of the once mightiest law school in the world could have seen by looking at our program:
The first speaker was Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen which has already filed eight suits against the Trump regime’s illegal orders, such as the shutting down of serious humanitarian support by the life-saving U.S. Agency for International Development.
He was followed by John Bonifaz, president of Free Speech for People, who is starting an “Impeach Trump Again” national drive against Trump with more than 250,000 signatures. Then came Mark Green, a primary co-author with me of two books on Trump – one presciently called “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.” Then James Henry, a strong advocate of justice for Palestinians, and so on. The Dean’s reaction was not to come within miles of this crowd. He made like this program didn’t exist. Follow the white flag of calculated surrender to Trump, a convicted felon, the most impeachable president in American history (See, Is any Member of Congress ready to impeach Trump? If so, we’ve drafted 14 articles of Impeachment, in the February/March 2025 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). Avoid strongly calling out Trump for his masked, ICE plainclothesmen kidnapping students and disappearing them to a Louisiana prison. Look the other way at this fast-emerging dictatorship and police state electing Napoleon in lieu of James Madison. Gloat over succeeding in keeping the audience down to about 40 people by going dark as if it never existed. Bruce Fein pointed out that the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence signed their death warrants on July 4, 1776, and we should be inspired by their example to rescue their handiwork from Trump’s mutilations.
Some Law School Deans are speaking up. A leader is Erwin Chemerinsky at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, who is networking with other Deans in standing tall and resolute. He wrote in the Washington Post that “… despite the risks of speaking out, silence itself comes at enormous cost. Giving in to a bully only makes things worse.”
It is not hard to feel sorry for Interim Dean Goldberg. He wants to become the permanent Dean. Toward that quest, you learn how to get along by going along with the wobbly Harvard president Alan Garber and his rubber stamp Board of Overseers.
A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy, wrote a best-selling book titled “Profiles in Courage.” I recommend it to the Dean and all the Harvard law faculty who looked the other way.
Former federal judge and now law professor Nancy Gertner did show up, did urge resistance and challenge to what she forthrightly called, on Democracy Now! Trump’s burgeoning coup d’état.
Aristotle would have liked Nancy Gertner. He once wrote that “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
The entire Day’s proceedings were videotaped and will be streamed in due time for nationwide viewership. Watch it in a dark room, Dean.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular