When Rachel Cohen resigned from her job at a big law firm earlier this year, she was giving up on three years of service and a $300,000 salary. But she found it more important to send a message about President Donald Trump — and her firm’s capitulation to an administration she sees as being engaged in extreme overreach and intimidation.
Her resignation “was attempting to get the firms to collectively recognize this moment for what it is: for the real, existential, nonpartisan threat to legal processes and procedures that we’re seeing in this country,” Cohen, a former Skadden Arps associate attorney, said during a panel discussion last week.
In mid-March, Cohen penned an open letter, now signed by nearly 2,000 lawyers, pledging to resign if her employer refused to push back on Trump’s series of executive orders targeting specific law firms for previously representing clients and causes counter to his interests. The firm accepted Cohen’s resignation and shortly after reached a $100 million, pro bono services deal with the administration.
“Since this is an existential threat, as opposed to a difference of political opinion, it’s very important that we act and speak collectively and in a measured and honest way,” Cohen said. “Once … [it] became extremely clear that the industry wasn’t going to act collectively, the efficacy of internal advocacy had run out for me, personally, at least.”
Cohen’s remarks came during a “Speak Up for Justice” webinar last week, which sought to shed light on the current strain and political pressure on the judiciary and the legal profession. Moderated by forum founder Paul Kiesel, a Los Angeles trial lawyer, the discussion comes amid a fraught moment in which officials are calling for the impeachment of judges, the Trump administration is ostensibly defying court orders, FBI agents have arrested a state judge and Americans are raising concerns about a one-sentence provision in the Trump-backed House reconciliation bill that would weaken the power of the courts to enforce a contempt citation.
“It’s essential to have courts, to have the support of people of the judges and the courts, and so it’s really important at a moment like now that we really highlight and don’t normalize or rationalize attacks on judges and on the court, because by doing so we’re harming ourselves and we’re harming the protector of our constitutional rights,” argued Ashley Akers, an ex-federal prosecutor who resigned from the post just days after Trump took office.
Throughout the discussion, panelists referenced Chief Justice John Roberts’ mid-May critique of people “trashing the justices” and declaration that the rule of law is “endangered” most among young people.
“When the Chief Justice said rule of law is in danger, I take him seriously. I don’t think he was exaggerating,” North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who previously served as a U.S. representative for the state, said during the discussion. “I don’t think the average person, when they have the opportunity to hear a nonpartisan account of the rule of law — the situation we’re in — I don’t think it strikes them as an exaggeration.”
U.S. Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown issued an even stronger warning than Roberts, admonishing the recent uptick in attacks of the bench and calls for impeachment, noting recent reports of escalations in threats against judges in the last five months.
“We know that words matter. We know that what’s perpetrated on the internet and elsewhere matters,” she said on the panel. “I think that we have to say that these current attacks on our judicial system, which are unprecedented and have begun to look like those in other countries, which he never really thought we would see — it is this backsliding.”
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Panelists also emphasized the physical harm that the charged rhetoric toward judges and other officials can cause, referencing high-profile instances of political violence over the last two decades. Will Rollins, a former California congressional candidate and Justice Department counterterrorism prosecutor, connected the threat of assassination he faced as a candidate to the fatal shooting of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’ son in 2020 by a disgruntled litigant and other acts.
“For the first time in my life, I understood, personally, how fear can stifle speech, debate and perhaps worst of all, the willingness to serve at all — the idea that you are putting yourself or people you love at risk, just for speaking your mind, just for disagreeing, just for running for office, just for serving on the bench,” he said.
“That is why attacks on Judge Esther Salas and her family, Congressman Steve Scalise, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, President Trump, Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and her family and far too many others throughout our recent history, are really attacks on all of us,” Rollins added. “They are attacks on the Constitution itself.”
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