But law firms are in a special position. They don’t just use the legal system; they play a critical role in creating and upholding it. Even more than other private actors, such as universities and media companies, law firms and lawyers have an established duty to uphold the integrity of the system they work in, not only for their own benefit but for the benefit of society. As the inscription on the New York State Supreme Courthouse in lower Manhattan says, “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.”

The New Yorker: It’s not inconceivable that, had the firms resisted the President’s executive orders, his momentum for lawlessness might have been curbed. “That expression of the corrosive damage done by the failure to protect people to whom we owe a duty has new resonance lately. In just the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has successfully pressured the Department of Justice to bring baseless criminal charges against the former F.B.I. director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom he perceives to be his political enemies, and he has threatened to arrest both the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois. Trump has ordered the National Guard into blue cities in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. His close adviser Stephen Miller has said that judges, prosecutors, and lawyers are protecting a movement of “leftwing terrorism,” and that “state power” should be used to dismantle “terror networks,” with the clear implication that those judges, prosecutors, and lawyers who oppose the Administration are part of those networks and should be punished accordingly. Then there are Trump’s long-term efforts to shred the Constitution, such as his executive order purporting to eliminate birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Bedrock legal principles of prosecutorial independence, separation of powers, and rule of law have been shattered, and it’s not clear when, or even if, they can be restored. A central goal of the first nine months of Trump’s second Administration has been to establish an unbridled and unopposed “unitary executive”—a fever dream of the far right which holds that the President has absolute authority over the entire executive branch, and that any independence of agencies or departments of the federal government is impermissible. It is obvious now, if it was only hypothetical in the early days of the second term, that achieving that goal requires making the Justice Department merely a tool of his political aims and forcing lawyers and judges to go along with his demands, or else. It is worth considering how we got here, and whether we could have done anything to slow this downward spiral. Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but it doesn’t require a giant speculative leap to conclude that, had major U.S. law firms not so quickly surrendered to Trump, this spring, he would have been denied early momentum for his lawlessness. Perhaps a united opposition might have even provided the opposite momentum, toward a defense of the rule of law…”

See also The capitulation of big law PLUS: A reaction from The Warning community member Joe Baerlein