Support for Law Firms Targeted by President’s Executive Orders Builds, with New Amicus Briefs
Amicus Brief in Support of Jenner & Block Amicus Brief in Support of WilmerHaleAmicus Brief in Support of Susman Godfrey
Stanford Law School faculty are again stepping up to support the law firms that are challenging several unprecedented executive orders President Donald Trump began issuing in March.
On April 10, Stanford Law faculty submitted two amicus briefs to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in support of lawsuits filed by WilmerHale and Jenner & Block. The briefs were signed by 676 law professors nationwide, including 27 members of the Stanford Law faculty. They come a week after Stanford Law faculty members submitted a similar brief in support of Perkins Coie, the first law firm to challenge the executive order against it. The earlier filing, submitted on April 2, included signatures from 363 legal scholars across the country.
To date, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block have all pushed back on the executive orders, and all have been granted temporary restraining orders. The firms are asking the court for summary judgment and injunctive relief.
The law professors’ briefs explain that the executive orders—which threaten to strip firms’ security clearances, block their access to federal buildings, cancel government contracts, and impose a range of other punitive restrictions—threaten the rule of law and upend the firms’ abilities to serve their clients. Trump’s executive orders are “self-declared act[s] of retribution that target[] a law firm for representing clients and causes the President disfavors.”
The executive orders violate the First, Fifth and Sixth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, according to the briefs, and their impact “reverberates far beyond the particular firm that is targeted.” Under the specter of these executive orders, the brief states, “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 … The Executive branch has no constitutional authority to use executive orders as a cudgel to beat the American legal system into submission.”
“Ultimately this should be a nonpartisan issue,” says Stanford Law Professor Phillip Malone, counsel of record for all three amicus briefs and a lead driver of the most recent filing. “It should not matter if you’re Democrat or Republican, conservative or progressive, everyone should agree on the critical importance of the rule of law and on ensuring that the government can’t interfere with law firms ability to represent the issues and causes they choose or to zealously represent their clients.”
“I’ve been very heartened by the number of amicus briefs filed in support of Perkins Coie in addition to ours, from across a wide array of groups, including former judges, bar associations, other law firms, defense lawyers, general counsel, media and press organizations, and many others, and it will surely be the same with these additional two firms,” Malone says. He noted that the most recent Stanford Law briefs on behalf of WilmerHale and Jenner & Block were likely to be among the first amicus briefs filed in these two cases.