The President’s Orders are self-declared acts of retribution that targeted law firms for representing clients and causes the President disfavors.2 In inflicting this retribution, the Orders contradict centuries of precedent safeguarding free speech, the right of association, and the right to petition. These precedents establish that the First Amendment “prohibits government officials from ‘relying on the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech.” Nat’l Rifle Ass’n v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 176 (2024) (quoting Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 67 (1963)). Targeting law firms for representing clients and espousing views the President dislikes is viewpoint discrimination, plain and simple.

Nor should this Court credit the government’s remarkable new argument on appeal that the injunctions against Section 1 of the Orders violate President Trump’s First Amendment right to say whatever he wants. Nothing in the injunctions prevents the President from speaking. Rather, they properly enjoin the government from
punishing the firms, depriving them of rights on the basis of the President’s disagreement with their clients and their views.

The district courts correctly found that the Orders violate the Fifth and Sixth Amendments as well.3 The Fifth and Sixth Amendments were designed to check executive power and to ensure a meaningful way to assert rights before a judicial authority. Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 61, 64–65 (1932). Forcing lawyers to bend to the preferences of federal officials robs clients of their right to counsel and introduces the very type of government interference in the administration of justice
the Founders acted to prevent.

Finally, the Orders threaten the rule of law. If the Orders are reinstated, it will be open season on lawyers who have dared to take on clients or causes the President or other officials don’t like. This is no hypothetical threat. In the run-up to the election, the President posted on Truth Social that “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law . . . . Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers . . . .” JA2461. Later, the President pledged before issuing the Order targeting Appellee Perkins Coie that it was merely among the first of “a lot of law firms that we’re going to be going after.” JA1988.

Indeed, in addition to the four Orders on appeal here, the President issued an additional executive order targeting another leading law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. JA1978–81. But rather than challenge the order directed against it, Paul Weiss caved to the President’s pressure, donating what the President described as “$40 million in pro bono legal services over the course of President Trump’s term to support the Administration’s initiatives” in exchange for the order’s revocation. JA1993–94 (President Trump’s Truth Social post); see also JA1996–97 (revoking original Executive Order targeting Paul Weiss). Eight other law firms similarly capitulated, promising to donate nearly $1 billion in uncompensated legal services to causes the President supports in order to stave off executive orders. Matthew Goldstein, Five More Big Law Firms Reach Deals with Trump, N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 11, 2025); Sam Baker, Law Firms Pledge Almost $1 Billion in Free Work to Trump, AXIOS (Apr. 12, 2025).

Faced with unanimous—and resounding—district court decisions blocking his unlawful orders, the President appeared to have temporarily paused his vendetta. But the administration’s recent about-face in withdrawing this appeal and then immediately reinstating it suggests that President Trump may be intent on resuming his retributive campaign.

The impact of the President’s Orders reverberates far beyond the particular firms that were targeted. Going forward, a lawyer or law firm that is asked to represent a client on a matter that is likely to trigger the President’s ire will have to weigh whether they are willing to be placed on the President’s target list—and lose the business such a placement entails. They must also ask whether taking on a client of this sort, and whether zealously advocating on that client’s behalf, will hurt other existing clients to whom ethical duties are owed. The Executive branch has no constitutional authority to use executive orders as a cudgel to beat the American legal system into submission.

Beyond the impact on clients and lawyers, orders of this type threaten the integrity of the judicial process, including the core role of judicial review. That anchor of our constitutional system cannot function when one person—regardless of his position—is empowered to threaten and punish lawyers for zealously representing their clients in court. “The Government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men.” Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 163 (1803). Let it not “cease to deserve this high appellation.” Id.

Amici urge the Court to affirm the district courts’ grants of summary judgment for Appellees.