Companies’ in-house lawyers are also nervous. They want to make sure their outside counsel is willing to fight the government if necessary. One lawyer working in a company’s general counsel office told Business Insider that her company’s advisors at a law firm that made a deal with Trump said it was necessary to hold onto influence with regulators.
“It just feels very cynical,” said the in-house lawyer, who wants to redirect work to other firms. “I don’t feel comfortable, if you’re going to cave in front of the government, that you’re going to represent me in front of the government.”
Even if you’re used to getting fucked over, why roll over? Fight back!
Legal Eagle said it best:
If a firm isn’t willing to fight for themselves, are they really willing to fight for you?
Fighting trump?
You get my business!
Exactly, I think it’s funny that the law firms that didn’t back down also retained two major clients (Boeing and Amazon) that you would expect to be automatically on team Trump, and that career DOJ lawyers just said, this is dumb fuck this I’m retiring rather than being humiliated trying to argue this dog shit in court.
The thing about bullies is they will take whatever you’re willing to give, but they usually can’t win a fight without psychological intimidation and large numbers backing them up.
Him and 500 law firms filed an amicus brief stating that the courts and the rule of law need to stand up to this out of control executive branch.
Now it’s up to the courts to decide if the law bends the knee.
The firms that have settled are shitheels but one thing to think about…these law firms won’t be able to do the work Trump wants to. They won’t break the law like Trump’s typical DollarGeneral lawyers. The moment they go to court they’ll be truthful and say, “we ain’t got shit” and be hosed.
This is very funny to me:
In a hearing on April 23, US District Judge Beryl Howell, who is overseeing Perkins Coie’s case, appeared incredulous at the government’s arguments. She subjected Richard Lawson, a Justice Department lawyer, to a barrage of often sarcastic questions about the scope of the executive order, brushing aside some of his positions as “hyper-technical legal arguments that may have no merit.”
On the docket, meanwhile, the administration is outgunned.
The two lawyers representing the government are Chad Mizelle, US Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, who worked in the first Trump administration and at a pair of elite law firms, and Lawson, who joined the Justice Department after a stint at a conservative nonprofit founded by Trump aide Stephen Miller.
Most of their legal arguments rely on constitutional interpretation of unchecked executive authority. This is actually the argument of a very prominent legal scholar and professor of constitutional law at Harvard.
While they’ve been calling everyone around them bureaucratic elitists, they’ve now jumped into the game very confidently but totally dependent on this argument only to have a judge essentially say, this may make for a good publication on legal theory but essentially has no basis in reality 🤣
You may be technically right but talking about the nonexistent legal justification for Trump’s actions at a time like this feels a lot like telling black people that because the civil rights act got passed in the 60s racism can’t happen anymore. In other words, yes there’s a rule but it doesn’t mean shit if it isn’t enforced.
??? That seems like kind of a bizarre takeaway, but just to be clear, this is far from over. We are in no way in the safe zone. Not even a little bit, DO NOT get complacent.
Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard Law professor, who is behind their legal argument has been writing about executive authority and Carl Schmitt (the legal architect of the Nazi agenda) for several years.
Unchecked executive authority is what allowed Hitler to legally carry out genocide. This is a very dangerous group of people.
It’s just very funny that a group of ivy league and silicon valley billionaires have been spending the last few months trying to rally the public and get them on their side by somehow claiming that anyone opposed to their actions is an out of touch elitist.
Meanwhile, the legal theory for the constitutional interpretation that is the basis of their entire power grab (judges can’t overrule a president’s order, we don’t have to have a warrant if we break down your door claiming we’re looking for gang members bc executive authority overrules individual liberty) is so highly technical and obscure, that it is actually a pretty flimsy argument and definitely out of touch with most American’s interpretation of the constitution (we the people did not want to be ruled by a king, so you can pry our liberty from our cold dead hands).
Someone like justice Alito (who also coincidentally happens to be an ivy league graduate) would probably still support Vermeule’s interpretation, so a weak argument is no guarantee of protection. What often seems to make or break the argument, is public knowledge and opinion, which can then lead to public pressure due to justices hoping to preserve their legacy in history.
You already have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to make the argument in the first place, but it would be next to impossible to make the public aware of this interpretation, and view it as anything other than an attempt to create a loophole allowing for the King to invade your home and seize your property, while taking away your right to defend yourself.
What’s crazy is that when those first firms were threatened, instead of other firms coming to their aid and standing together against this breach, they instead tried to steal their clients.
That’s just objectively untrue. Some might have, sure, but many firms joined the fight immediately. Don’t suggest nobody else came to their aid when that is just not the case.
