American Bar Association adopts resolution against Trump's law firm crackdown
The resolution, opens new tab is the latest in an escalating conflict between the Trump administration and the ABA, which is the nation's largest voluntary lawyer organization with about 170,000 dues-paying members. In recent months, the ABA has publicly clashed with the administration over officials' attacks on judges and law firms, while government officials have dismissed the ABA as a 'snooty' organization of 'leftist lawyers' and alleged that some of its diversity efforts are illegal.
The U.S. Department of Justice has barred its attorneys from participating in ABA events and curtailed the organization's ability to vet new federal judicial nominations. Trump in April threatened to revoke the ABA's status as the federally recognized accreditor of law schools.
The rule of law 'will not long survive if lawyers and law firms are threatened and punished for doing their jobs and if judges are threatened with punishment for doing their jobs,' the ABA's new resolution said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the resolution.
The ABA has brought multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, including a pending case filed in July that seeks an order barring the White House from pursuing what the ABA called a campaign of intimidation against major law firms.
The ABA said Trump's actions, including executive orders targeting specific firms, have chilled the ability of some public-interest organizations to find lawyers for new matters. Reuters in a special report last month described how some firms were retreating from public interest legal work in the wake of Trump's pressure campaign.
The Justice Department on Friday asked, opens new tab a federal judge in Washington D.C., to dismiss the ABA's case, arguing that there's no certainty that Trump will target the business operations of another firm, and that the claims could only be brought by individual plaintiffs, and not the "monolithic" ABA. The DOJ also said the ABA hadn't shown Trump's actions had dissuaded lawyers from taking certain cases.
The ABA's House of Delegates is meeting Monday and Tuesday in Toronto to consider a slew of resolutions, many of which relate to the federal government and the rule of law. The resolution opposing attacks on lawyers and law firms also opposes threats to impeach judges 'based solely on disagreement with the merits of the rulings made by those judges.'
Since returning to the White House, Trump has issued a series of executive orders targeting law firms over their past clients and lawyers they hired. Nine law firms have struck deals with the president, pledging nearly $1 billion in free legal services on mutually agreed legal issues with the White House in order to stave off similar executive orders.
Four law firms successfully sued the administration to block the orders against them, which stripped their lawyers of security clearances and restricted their access to government officials and federal contracting work.
Read more:
How Trump's crackdown on law firms is undermining legal defenses for the vulnerable
What Republican, Democratic judges said about Trump's law firm orders
ABA ramps up defense of judges as White House dismisses 'snooty' lawyers
American Bar Association sues to block Trump's attacks on law firms
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The move follows the Trump administration's deployment of both the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles earlier this year; in a press conference announcing the move on Monday, Trump suggested that he also intends to deploy the military to cities such as Baltimore, Oakland and New York. 'This will go further,' he said. 'We're starting very strongly with DC' The deployment reflects Trump's continued determination to further erode the longstanding American taboo against deploying military personnel for domestic law enforcement. It hardly matters what the pretext for such moves are. In LA, Trump claimed that protests against his administration's kidnapping of immigrants was causing unsustainable disorder in the city; it wasn't. In DC, Trump is likewise claiming that crime is out of control; it is not. (Crime has in fact dropped precipitously in Washington over the past decade, with violent crimes declining by more than half since 2013; there has been an especially steep decline in the crime rate since 2023.) In a bit of dark comedy, attorney general Pam Bondi appeared at the press conference and stood at a podium to declare that crime in DC would soon come to an end, all while flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump, two men accused – and, in Trump's case, convicted – of numerous crimes themselves. But no one is really supposed to believe that the deployment of troops to America's most liberal, most racially diverse, and most culturally thriving cities is an actual response to an actual crisis. Rather, the thinness of the pretext is itself a demonstration of power. The Trump administration, and national Republicans more broadly, have increasingly been willing to argue that Democratic rule is illegitimate even where Democratic politicians are duly elected; the nationalization of law enforcement in DC follows from this premise, seizing authority that rightly belongs to the Democratic local officials and distributing it to the Republican national figures who will brook no disagreement and tolerate no imposition of policies with which they disagree. Such a move may not, in the end, lead to widespread violence: aside from the lack of much actual crime for them to respond to, the capital is unbearably hot in the summertime, and one imagines sleepy-looking National Guard troops wandering aimlessly around the National Mall in the August swamp heat, wilted and sweaty in their tactical gear. But the imposition should, in a country with sufficient civic virtue, spawn mass protests all the same. 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