Welcome, everyone. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming. Welcome to the Rule of Law Speaker Series, hosted by the Neukom Center for the Rule of Law. We’re pleased to welcome David Chiu, the San Francisco City Attorney, as our first speaker for this quarter. David… public law offices bringing landmark cases to protect and expand the rights of San Franciscans while holding high-quality legal counsel to about a hundred city departments, boards, and commissions.
The son of immigrant parents, who grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his undergraduate, master’s in public policy, and law degrees from Harvard.
… is an assembly member in the California state legislature.
… law and… state and local governments in protecting the rule of law. So please join me in welcoming.
Good afternoon. Thank you, professor, and really appreciate the invitation to comment and spend some time with all of you. And I’m really also just appreciate that, I know some of you might have come for the free food, but the fact that you all here thinking about the rule of law, we need hundreds of rooms like you in schools across our country.
It’s also… campus as professor… substandard school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And certainly, having gone to law school in a place that is far colder in the winter, far warmer in the summer, I am super bummed when I come on this campus at the incredible experience that you have.
But let me start by saying, I’ve been asked to speak about some of my perspectives at this moment regarding the rule of law and specifically the interactions with federal government and state and local governments. And let me say that this is a topic that many of us in government have not really had to think hard about until this very moment. I’m also gonna just mention by way of introduction that when I was sitting in your seats as a law student, I literally did not know what the role of a city attorney was or even a county council. It was not a career path I had thought about when I was in school. Now, this is a couple decades ago. The aspiration for many of us in law school were to work in the federal government, ’cause that was where things happened, that was where… to have impact.
And I’m gonna just open my observation… how I ended up getting into this work that has to do with something that happened 11 years ago. I was a freshman… in Sacramento, had just been elected to the California State Assembly. And I was asked by the… author, what they told me would be a small minor bill to address what was happening in fake crisis pregnancy centers. So I’ll tell you the picture. If you see the bus signs, they’ll say, Are you pregnant? Are you scared? Come here. And there are several hundred locations throughout California, thousands throughout our country, where you walk in, you’ll be met by individuals wearing white lab coats, who you will think are doctors and scientists.
We’ll tell you that if you want to consider exercising your right to choose, you will get breast cancer, you will become infertile, or you will become suicide. And… capacity… called a Reproductive FACT Act that required every health clinic in the state to provide a piece of paper to every pregnant woman walking through the doors that said, very simply, just two lines—in the state of California, you have the right to prenatal care, you have the right to family planning services, or you have the right to choose. That was it. We passed the law, and I didn’t really think much of it, signed by the governor… law was challenged in four district courts in California, and we thought, okay, here we go.
We, one, in each of those four courts, 4-0. I thought, that’s great… Okay, what’s gonna happen here? And the decision came down unanimous, 3-0, in our favor that the Reproductive FACT Act was… Now, let me just remind you that there was a time period not long ago when we assumed that the case known as Roe v. Wade was not… we had all assumed that Roe v. Wade would be on the books forever. We had all taken it for granted.
That Ninth Circuit decision came down in October of 2016. A few weeks later, the unthinkable happened. Donald Trump was elected to his first term, and a few weeks after that, he announced that Neil Gorsuch would be his next appointee to the bench. And a few months after that, my little Reproductive FACT Act gets appealed up to the big house… NIFLA v. Becerra. And I realized, oh my God, this was the four chess moves that they had been thinking about… after that, sitting… as the author of that state law, as the nine justices were literally debating what was the legislative intent… it was literally, it was hard to do, to just sit on my hands, to not stand up and see justices because… where this was going. Got the decision shortly after that. It was the first decision of the new Trump majority striking down California’s Reproductive FACT Act. At that time, with a vote of 4-5…
That moment I decided to go, one, as someone who had not been practicing law, I was an elected official as a legislator for almost 14 years. Or sorry, at that point, that was about 10 or 11. But I decided that I needed at some point to go back to… But that case also really highlighted the inherent tensions that we have when you have a federal government that is not… or even supportive of the idea that state and local governments ought to be able to do what they want.
So let me start with also a related observation from my very first point, which is we have had a really long tradition in the United States of the federal government cooperating with working with state and local entities, what I refer to as cooperative federalism. In fact, many Americans, when they think about what government is, they don’t make distinctions between federal government, state governments, and local governments. They’re all, we’re all just considered this one big monolith known as the government. But as we’ve seen, as our federal government under the control of Donald Trump has become more autocratic. State and local governments, we have had to lean into our constitutionally protected sovereignties. We’ve had to act to uphold the rule of law that we understood. But the rule of law that has been on the books for centuries, when you have a federal government that is violating the rule of law, the Constitution on a daily basis.
So today I’m gonna mention, I’m gonna discuss three sort of general observations about what this administration is doing to the rule of law in particular, when it comes to how it impacts state movement.
The first is one that is… and that is this federal government has been involved in a frontal assaults on the policies that are set by state and local governments. I’ll explain what that means in a second, but the second observation I’ll talk about is how we’ve also seen a much more subtle… by… of the enforcement of rights that are established by federal, state laws in a whole variety of contexts.
The third observation I’ll make is just about how this federal government is coming after state and local governments through the elections process. The idea of challenging fair and free elections. And as I talk about these observations, I’ll also talk about the role of my office and offices like mine in this discussion.
So the first observation around this frontal assault by the federal government on state rule. So let me take us back to a few years before Trump was reelected. Steve Bannon was asked… not been able to get out of my head for a couple of years. He described the pace and the relentlessness of how he was gonna come at us with the phrase “muzzle philosophy.” So he literally said, We are going to come after them… but really referring to all of us, particularly state and localities that disagree with them. We’re gonna come at them, and every day, we’re gonna take multiple shots at civil society, at all the things that we don’t like and what he specifically said, and I quote, they will only be able to defend… and we’ll get everything else we want.
So, to give you a sense of what that pace has felt like. So my predecessor, who ran the San Francisco City Attorney’s office during Trump 1.0, he filed two lawsuits… my office, during the first year of the second Trump administration, we have been forced to file 14 times. So if you do the math, we are litigating at six times the pace. Not because we want to bring lawsuits, but because we have to. ‘Cause every single day, they are coming at us with muzzle philosophy.
Let me give you a sense of the 14 lawsuits that we brought… I’ve broken it up into three categories.
First, we have been leading a lot of the national fights when it comes to immigration issues. We were the first city to sue Donald Trump the day after he was inaugurated, day after he signed an executive order to try to ban birthright citizenship, which, all you also know, is a precedent in your first year comm law class… citizen, who was born in my city. And during an anti-immigrant era, the audacity to travel back to China to visit his family. And when he came back, he was held on the steamboat for five months while the federal government worked really hard to try to kick him out of his country. You all know the punchline. It was actually Chinese immigrant families that put monies together to hire the best lawyers that he could. The United States Supreme Court, at a time when you had a federal administration that was very anti-immigrant, uphold the very plain reading of the 14th Amendment that says, if you’re born here in the United States, you are the citizen.
The second lawsuit that we filed was on behalf of San Francisco and the county of Santa Clara, where your civil rights… Donald Trump has really… during the Trump 1.0 era, we prevail. But he doubled down again in the early part of his administration, and he threatened cities like San Francisco, counties like Santa Clara, to remove all of our federal companies, which, for my city, by the way, is almost 4 billion dollars. If he refuse to deputize our police officers as ICE agents. So, in other words, he has wanted to commandeer all of our local law enforcement to be his extensions of ICE. Second category of lawsuits we’ve brought have been around federal funding. And let me explain, this is an area that all of us were litigating this, and know very well, but the public knows less well. That Donald Trump is coming after immigrants and the LGBTQ community, the idea of DEI, climate change, et cetera. But what you don’t know is… execute on his strategy is he sends letters out to every city, county, state in the country that says, if you would like to receive federal funding in this area, you have to sign a document that says that you will implement anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-DEI, anti-climate change, anti-reproductive life provisions. You’ve got a sign on the…, which puts all of us in the position of making a horrific set of choices. Do we get the money, do we give in? Or do we forego the money, which in the case of sanctuary cities would be $3.7 billion, to continue our way? Or the third option is, do we litigate?
Nine of the 14 cases my office has had to bring has been around federal funding. I will tell you, we were at the Ninth Circuit this morning on a case that involved… those kind of illegal conditions on funding for homelessness, housing for us, funding to SFO where you guys fly out if you wanna go to other parts of the country, to the largest public transit system in the Bay, which is San Francisco’s immune system as well as for health and human services.
So over $2 billion at stake in the Ninth Circuit courtroom today. On a different front, I’ll just point out an incredible irony here. Donald Trump likes to refer to cities like San Francisco and other more liberal cities as cesspools of crime. At the same time, he’s doing that, he’s trying to withhold public safety funding with all these illegal conditions. He’s saying literally, if you want money for cops, if you want money to prepare for the Super Bowl or the World Cup because the Bay Area happens to be a target for terrorism, you have to… these conditions. So we have had to litigate these issues in the courts.
Let me tell you about the third category cases that we are litigating and that has to do with public goods, which is not exactly something Donald Trump believes in, but some of the cases we have brought have been on behalf of education. We brought the first lawsuit challenge the… of AmeriCorps rules, trying to cut off funding to our schools around AmeriCorps… that. Here’s a second topic that my guess is, hopefully many of you are familiar with: Donald Trump has tried to change the rules when it comes to public service loan programs.
So in San Francisco, for example, we have 2100 public servants who are having their loans forgiven because when they went to expensive schools, there was a commitment that if they worked in the public sector for 10 years, their loans would be fully forgiven. Donald Trump is trying to change that midstream… pursuing is air we breathe, water we drink, climate change. Trump has come after all sorts of climate programs, including programs addressing environmental justice issues, the tax credits that came out of the Inflation Reduction Act, which are trying to jumpstart a clean energy set of industries throughout our country, and so on. Another set of public goods, healthcare. You all are very familiar with or likely familiar with what’s going on with the big ugly bill. You may not know all of the different ways in which Trump is coming after healthcare.
Give one example of a case that we litigated. In the first couple weeks of the second Trump administration, there was an executive order that came down that said if there’s health data around people who are different, particularly the LGBTQ… quotes, we shall eliminate all collection of healthcare data. So he move to literally strip 80,000 websites and dataset from the Departments of Health & Human Services, drug administration, Centers for Disease Control, et cetera. And it was my city working with a number of doctors that sued to successfully…
One last lawsuit I’ll mention as a public good, literally government itself. We had to bring a lawsuit along with Santa Clara to challenge the complete dismantling of the federal government. The idea that Donald Trump has that he can simply, with a wave of the magic wand, eliminate 40, 50, 60 percent of entire departments from existence. So we’re litigating these…
Now, a few things I will say about our litigation. We have a lot of the same claims in all these lawsuits. So, we typically are bringing 10th Amendment claims, right? This idea that the federal government is not… sources… claims, the idea that only Congress can change the law that allow him to do what he wants to do.
We’re litigating with the spending clause, the idea that the executive branch can’t impose arbitrary or ambiguous federal conditions that have nothing to do with programs that we are entitled to under various… and we’re litigating… acronym, but has turned out to be one of the most important federal laws that we have, which simply say to the administration, you have rules that you have to follow… You promulgate regulations to do away with what you wanna do.
Let me just… of this response by… when we started this litigation, there were very few cities that joined in this litigation because cities… phrase I kept hearing was the eye of… cities literally would say to me, we love the fact that you’re litigating sanctuary cities, we love the fact that you’re litigating federal funding, but if we add ourselves to that, they’ll take our funding away. So shoo, go for it. Good luck. Go with that. That change in the second half of last year.
Wow. And I’ll give some data on that. So our  sanctuary lawsuit that we brought with Santa Clara County, two of us, and despite the fact there are hundreds of sanctuary jurisdictions, there were only three other brave cities that joined us. So you had a total of five local jurisdictions that fought for the first six months of last year. Today, at the point, we have six jurisdictions that are part of that lawsuit. I mentioned today the case that is in front of the Ninth Circuit on issues of housing and transportation, and health services. We started ourselves, Santa Clara, and six other jurisdictions, so eight local jurisdictions altogether. Today, we have 62. The reason things have changed over the past year is really twofold.
One, here’s a really good one is we are winning. We are winning most of these cases in the lower courts. I always have to preface it with that. Of the 12 lower court decisions we have received in the first 14 that we have sued, we have prevailed in 11 months, which is remarkable. Testament to the fact that this judiciary is still independent.
There is another reason, though, why local jurisdictions have realized it’s in their benefit to join us, and that has to do with a Supreme Court decision that came down in the middle part of last year, some of you’re nodding your head, that foot limitations on the application of preliminary injunctions. It used to be during Trump 1.0 that if… got a PI just for San Francisco on sanctuary, that would apply to everybody else. And so everyone else literally could actually free ride if we chose to invest our resources and we won the fight. After the Supreme Court cost a decision, that was no longer the case. And so all of a sudden all these sanctuary jurisdictions realized, oh wait, we can’t wait for San Francisco to win. If we’re not part of that lawsuit, we won’t benefit from the victory. So that has…
Let me now talk about what I refer to as a much more subtle erosion by the federal administration when it comes to the protections of all of us in our states and our localities, and that has to do with the administration’s abdication of enforcing a whole variety of protections that have been put in place for decades.
So I’m talking about worker protections, consumer protections, environmental protections, civil rights protections. Historically, the federal government has led in this space. They’re the ones who are active for holding bad actors, particularly bad corporate actors, accountable, and agencies… Department of Labor, EPA, Department of Justice, all of its agencies. A lot of how they view their work was we are gonna hold bad actors accountable. The Trump administration has, I would say, not just slowed down these efforts, but shut down these efforts. Let me give you some numbers. The organization of Public Citizen recently analyzed that the administration has canceled 145 enforcement actions against 153 corporations facing federal investigations, enforcement lawsuits, or other measures for lawbreaking. And on top of that, there have been 14 corporations who had enforcement actions frozen. So, we’re talking almost 160 canceled or halted enforcements representing some… 40% of these action canceled or frozen or against corporations for consumer protection.
Just to give you a few examples… cases against Walmart and Branch Messenger. Those were two companies that were sued for opening up deposit accounts for more than a million delivery drivers illegally. They had harvest over $10 million of junk fees through Walmart’s driver program. Another company, Rocket Homes, some of you may be familiar with, that in the real estate space. CFPB under Biden had sued to stop an illegal kickback scheme that was… Another company, Reliant Holdings. The CFPB had sued this company for legally baiting, gouging, trapping families in high-fee credit cards, where consumers were charged up to $300 a year in fees, and the credit card could only be used to buy overpriced items from a company that was affiliated with Reliant Holdings.
I don’t know how any of you feel about that, but you multiply that by the dozens of entities we’re talking about. Now, one other thing I wanna point out, as these decisions are being made to drop enforcement, dismiss enforcement, they might have the appearance of having been motivated by donations or ties to Donald Trump.
So, for example, Bank of America donated a half a million dollars to Trump’s 2024 inaugural fund. And lo and behold, under Trump, the CFPB has dismissed a pending case against BoA related to alleged misconduct having to do with selling network banks for not doing enough to reimburse customers who were defrauded by standards that were using that network.
Toyota. A few years ago, CFPB had entered into a consent decree with the automobile manufacturer to address the fact that the company was literally directing customers who were trying to cancel certain things, sending them to a dead-end hotline. Literally, you would call the hotline, and they would be sent in a circle… over this. Toyota was supposed to do all sorts of things for consumers, and then they donated a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural fund. CFPB terminated the consent, and which literally meant that tens of millions of dollars that the Biden administration had gotten Toyota to agree to pay to consumers would not have to be paid.
Just to give you a sense of other areas of enforcement retreat, there have been 22 matters in the cryptocurrency enforcement arena that have been pulled back on, 18 cases in the work of protection space, 17 cases in the antitrust and competition-related enforcement, 15 examples when it comes to foreign corruption and bribery. So that’s the bad news.
Those of you who had come to Stanford Law School thinking you are going to do this work with the federal government, so to say… but lemme tell you… and in offices like mine, we are stepping… I, until recently, chaired an association of the largest city attorneys and county councils in California. We are leaning in. I’m gonna give you some examples of the type of cases that we bring, just to what your appetite of what is possible because government is secondary. We have to obviously step into the breach.
So, a couple of cases that my office have been involved in on the affirmative side when it comes to consumers, we sued the opioid industry, like many cities and counties around the country. We were able to win a $350 million settlement for San Francisco, which by the way was a record involved, a record per capita settlement of the single company aimed to a city.
At a time when 75% of folks on the street to San Francisco, who are addicted to drugs, start their addiction because of something that they were prescribed earlier in their life, having…
Big tobacco. Just in the last couple years, my office has won millions of dollars enforcing some of our laws that prohibit companies that are legally selling flavored tobacco products, or baking products, or pouches. A San Francisco resident, particularly kids. Worker protection. A couple years ago, I started… of its kind for a local public office like mine. We had brought in, as of this week, $28 million with a handful of attorneys, particularly against companies that are misclassifying gig economy workers as independent contractors.
And at this moment, we are litigating one of the most significant cases when it comes to climate change. The biggest fossil… impact in sea level rise, and what it’s forcing when it comes to billions of dollars of infrastructure that San Francisco has to pay. Let me give a couple of examples of cases that we’ve been litigating just this past year that are first of its kind in the country.
My office brought a first, actually in the world, case against 16 of the largest AI-generating deepfake pornography companies. These are companies where you go to their websites, and anyone can upload a photo. 99.9% of them are photos of women and girls, and turn it within 30 seconds into non-consensual pornography, which then floats in the internet. We sued the companies responsible for 200 million visitors in the first half of 2024. As of this moment, we have shut down 11. Despite what the Trump administration has said on this topic, they have not yet acted.
On a different subject, just Friday, I brought a lawsuit along with our attorney general against a group of affiliated websites and individuals that are disseminating codes on their website that allow anyone to download those codes and use a 3D printer to create ghost guns or machine guns. I don’t know how many of you are aware that this could be done, but it can be done, and it can be done by criminals, folks who are barred from owning firearms, or by your 15-year-old name.
And a third topic I’ll just mention to cases of interest to anybody. There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the plight of ultra process boots. And we brought first lawsuit in the country to sue of the largest ultra-processed food manufacturers and responsible… on constituents in California and around the globe.
So I mentioned these because again, with the lack of federal enforcement requires our communities in different states and different localities to step in.
Let me talk about the third topic that I am highly concerned about when it comes to what this administration is doing versus state and localities. And that has to do with how the rule of law used by this administration its impact elections.
So let me just talk about something that had been under the radar, really, until the last couple of weeks. The Trump Administration sent letters to almost every state in the country and to many localities, including San Francisco, that said, you shall turn over all of your unredacted voter rolls. This includes information around social security numbers. This includes information around driver’s licenses. They’ve asked this of everybody. A number of red states complied, but as you can imagine, a lot of states, red and blue, refuse to turn this information over. This issue is being litigated as we speak. In the early cases, we’ve been winning on this, but I mentioned that for the following context.
So in the last month or so, the Department of Justice has been employing new tactics in this space. So in the same day that Alex Pretti is murdered in Minneapolis, Attorney General Bondi sent to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz a letter saying, you shall turn over all of your voter rolls. And that’s one of the quotes, solutions to how you end our federal invasion, as if voter rolls has anything to do with ICE enforcement or military occupation. That same week, the FBI went into Fulton County, Georgia, to seize 200 records, ballots, voting records, as part of their efforts denied 2020 electoral results.
And up for a vote this week in the House of Representatives is the SAVE America Act, which would put many more onerous requirements, particularly requiring proof of citizenship for folks who vote. You may have heard last week, Donald Trump said that he believes that his federal government ought to get involved in elections. And within a short period of time, the same Steve Bannon, who talked about muzzle velocity, said, and I think we should have ICE and military troops guarding, policing polling stations. So obviously, these are tactics that could result in many horrific outcomes. But I’ll tell you what some of the good means.
One, we have this thing called the Constitution. And the Constitution says that it is state officials, and by virtue of that, it is local elected officials who have a responsibility for carrying out how elections are health. And I can assure you that in California, we are in good hands. I am confident that in jurisdictions around our state, as well as the administration run by California Secretary of State, we are in good hands when it comes to what’s gonna happen in 2026 in the election, and what will happen in 2028 and beyond. But I am highly concerned about what may or may not happen in other states or counties.
So let’s recap: a frontal assault on state and local governments when it comes to our policies, the abdication of federal enforcement, and the undermining of free and fair elections. Do I have any good news?
…slightly excessive that I’m gonna suggest ’cause I know how much free time all these students have that you consider reading. It happens to have been written by some professors from my alma mater. I apologize for that. But the book is called How Democracy Dies. And the thesis of the book, and it’s unbelievably compelling, is that as they looked at the history of the world over the last century at autocracies that were originally democracies. You would think that process happens typically quickly through violent coups at the end of a barrel of military takeovers… because in most, for many, that transition… occurred when head of a state of a country, who is democratically elected, decides over a period of years, months, weeks, or days to undermine democratic institutions. So, literally, the playbook that we are seeing today.
I often think about how I’m not sure if we are living in 1933 Germany or 1939 Germany, but I think we are somewhere in that decade. I think a lot about the poem, and I’ll just share, during that time period, that said, first they came for the socialist, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a socialist, and then they came for Trade Unionists, I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist…
You and then they came for m,e and there was no one to speak for it. I think about… of that poem, it goes something like this: first they came after birthright citizens and undocumented families. They came for trans kids, and our LGBT friends… came for universities, media, and they came for so on and so on, all within the first year of this second administration.
So what are we to do? I’ve had many conversations with friends of mine who are attorneys general, who are also on the forefront of this fight. We often talk about the three Cs. The Cs of courts, crowds, and courage.
So courts, as I alluded to at this moment with two branches of government completely captive by the hypocrisy. We do have a judiciary that is still independent, and I might emphasize, the independence is not just folks appointed by Democrats, but folks appointed by Republicans, including Trump appointees. And so as many lawsuits… filed, there are so many more lawsuits that we could be filing. And this is why I look out onto all of you, and I hope you guys are either helping out in some way, or you graduate as quickly as possible to get involved in the fight.
Secondly, it has been dispiriting for a good chunk of this year at how we haven’t been able to actually see people mobilize. And I’m not talking about physical crowds, although that is incredibly important. We need to see crowds out on the streets, taking the streets back to our country, but organizing people in different sectors.
I know that not all of you are gonna go into public sector law or litigate these types of cases. You may go into technology, you may go into real estate, you may go into venture capital, but we need crowds in every sector of society, organism, whether you’re in the venture capital community, or starting the next AI company, or getting involved in land use matters, real estate matters, et cetera, et cetera.
And so… and we need you to think about what role are you gonna have, whatever part of civil society we live in.
The last thing I’m gonna say is courage. Goes without saying that for lawyers to do what they do or crowds to organize, for any of us during this dark time of the rule of law, we need courage.
Dr. King often talked about how our measure as human beings is not where we sit in times of comfort or convenience, but where do we stand in moments of challenge in… And so as Harvey Milk would say, as a representative of San Francisco, I have to quote him, I’m really here to recruit you. I’m here to say we need you to get involved in courts, need you to be involved when it comes to organizing and building those crowds, and we need you to have courage because we don’t have enough of us on our side. But if we all band together, if you have the courage to stand up, if you have the courage to think… if you have courage to think rule of law needs to stand years and years to come, our constitution needs to stand for years and years to come, I want to ask you to join us in our fight.
Questions, just come down to the mic.
Or you could yell it out, and I’ll just repeat the question.
Question. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit more about the interaction that you have with our own attorney general in California and his office, because they’ve also been quite active… with jurisdiction… ins and outs of that.
Yeah, so when I was talking about crowds and organizing, I never expected that this past year for me would be a major exercise in organizing. I’ll explain that in a few… So first, to answer your question, Rob Bonta was one of my closest friends in the state legislature, and so it was just totally fortuitous that he became Attorney General, I became City Attorney.
… when a horrific thing happens, which is every day, we reach out and say, are you and your colleagues in the Ag network gonna take it, or should we in our localities do it? As you can imagine, depending on the issue, different parties have different standing, different cases that we can make in different narratives, frankly, around lawsuits.
So in some instances, it makes a lot of sense for… governments to sue, particularly if it involves federal funding directly to us where states don’t have jurisdiction stand. In other instances, it’s individuals or organizations that can bring lawsuits. And so we have many of those conversations. There’s a lot of divide-and-conquer work that’s happening. I’ll mention that Trump… Democratic Attorney Generals worked very well and programmed together, and in the year before Trump was reelected, started thinking about Project 2025 and what they were gonna do. They have been truly the gold standard in how to organize, and I’ll explain it in a following way.
They get on regular conference calls a number of times a week, and they have the discussion I just mentioned, which is what just happened? Who is gonna take an issue? Who’s going to research and figure out if we can sue, and maybe… next day it’s California. And then, so they divide and conquer work. But then, when someone is ready to sue, they circulate the petition, and 18-26 states will sue at the same time… so when you go to the courts and explain, this is something that impacts all of us. We didn’t have that network when Trump 2.0 started. As City Attorney, I thought we were all gonna be joining in, but there were literally only a handful of cities in counties around the country that were… this. Santa Clara being one of them. I’ll single out Chicago County, up in state of Washington. What we have done, though, this past year is we have built up that infrastructure in a lot of different ways. I mentioned that I am part of a network of the largest city attorney and county counsels in California. So we program on a very regular basis in California on how to respond to some of this. But we are also doing that now regularly with a hundred cities and counties around…
Maybe introduce yourself.
Hi, I’m Martin, recently graduated from here, but I just wanted to ask, and you partially answered this with your last question, given the constraints of staffing, the citywide budget crisis, and also a less friendly Ninth Circuit that one would like, how do you decide which cases to take necessarily?
That is a great question. My office doesn’t have the resources to litigate every single case. I have a relatively large attorney’s office, and we’ve got about 200 lawyers… amazing graduates from your institution. We have to… So we have a series of criteria, but as you can imagine, we’re weighing how much does this impact our funding? How much does this impact our policies? Are there any ways for us to get around mitigation? Are there other lawsuits that are addressing these issues? And if the answer to those questions go a certain way, we litigate.
My office has incredibly dedicated lawyers who this past year have been working around the clock because by and large we didn’t get additional resources given budget crises that the city are facing. We received a few extra dollars from the state legislature to be able to fund some of this work, but it’s an ongoing struggle for us to be able to do this work.
As Lucy knows, we have a relationship with some school clinics that have literally donated tens of thousands of pro bono student hours to us to help us do this. But it is challenging.
I’m sorry, you had one other part of your question that I don’t think I answered.
Last…
So when I clerked for the Ninth Circuit, it was, and that was 30 years ago, it was known as the most liberal circuit in the country. But during the first Trump Administration, as you may know, 10 of the 29 judges were appointed by his administration. And so, those of you who know how the Ninth Circuit worked, works a lot of cases, they’re decided by three-judge panels.
So literally it’s a luck of the draw who you get. So, we are still obviously litigating plenty of cases in the Ninth Circuit, but there are times when we’re litigating cases with jurisdictions in other parts of the country where we’ll decide to defer to our colleagues in Boston, or in Maryland, Philadelphia, state of Washington, and we think a little bit about that. By and large, our perspective is the laws the law. And we think these laws should be upheld through our interpretation on that, through their interpret. And our hope is that even with judges that we have in Ninth Circuit that we’ll be able to make…
Hi. Thank you so much for being here. A lot of students have already gotten their jobs basically for post-graduation, and for the students who are gonna go into private practice, either plaintiffs or defense, at least immediately after graduating, do you have a call to action for what they should be doing, both with their pro bono time and just in general?
Yeah. I have a couple of thoughts. Having gone to Harvard, I know here at Stanford, all of you have probably received many law firm. My guess also is, though, many of you, when you apply to this school, had certain ideas of what you wanted to do as a lawyer that might not be billing 2,500 hours a year at a big law firm. And I would say if you have decided to go that route in your early years after graduation, think about what you wanna get out of that big law experience and execute on that as best you can. So, for example, if you need to pay off your student loans, give yourself a deadline and say, I’m gonna pay off my loans in two years, and stick it. It’s really easy once you are making that money to say, yeah, I’m just gonna spend some money on some nicer suits and some really nice dinners and buy the better car. Strongly suggest you think about that, but also think about what is the work that just calls you.
My guess is if your law school is like mine. Two-thirds, 70% of the incoming first years here at Stanford Law School said you wanted to save the world in some way. You wanted to stand up for civil rights or labor rights, or the environment, or et cetera. And I want you to think about what does it mean to stay true to that? And that could mean doing a lot of pro bono work in that space and maybe pivoting to that over time, supporting organizations in this work. We have a huge need for really great litigators on cases, and we would love for any number of you after… with us, or offices like us, or organizations, or individuals need representation. So make those decisions now.
In fact, I’ll give one more challenge for you, which is have these thoughts as 3Ls. Write it down on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and have a date that you’re gonna open it up in a year or two, and see if you can hold yourself to that. I’ve given this exercise to folks over the years, and I have gotten a lot of good feedback that when you’re billing 2,500 hours a year, it’s easy to, and you’re in the total institution of these big law firms, it’s easy to forget what you’re trying to do with your life. You are all too talented, and there’s too many bad things happening in the world for you not to do what you had hoped.
I had a question about, you said that the three Cs are like towards the crowds, and then the courage. My question is, in your opinion, both as a city attorney and as a former state legislator, where do you need like the crowds the most right now?
Honestly, you could use as many places as we can. I was surprised after Minneapolis that there weren’t more crowds that were protesting from because I think what we saw in Minnesota was, we’re state sanctuaries, right? When the federal government initially says, We got this investigation, and we are already defending, we’ve already decided innocence of what’s happened. That’s… and so I do think that just basic protests are important, but I also talk about crowds in the context of organizing in any sector that you are in. Because I’m always amazed how… let’s say folks who work in technology or AI or more traditional corporate sectors who say, I can’t believe what’s happening, but I feel so helpless right now. And I think to myself, you’re part of the C-Suite. You have conversations every day… leaders, you have much more power than you… And that, frankly, all of you will have those opportunities if you go into big law to engage with corporate decision makers, who are… and so I mean it at two levels.
I do think folks have to work. I love the fact that students have helped to drive some of this organizing in this past year… from every background.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for coming here. My name is also David. I was actually as city attorney intern this past summer. I think we saw each other at the Giants game.
Oh. Who’s actually doing some work that’s selling.
I was really curious. The topic of this talk is about the role of federalism, and one of the things that I’m particularly interested in is the role of state authority and local autonomy. So I’m curious, given your unique experience in the state legislature, and then in city hall, and now as the city attorney, if that’s given you any particular insight into the ideal balance between the two.
There are 9,000 ways to answer that. I could probably give an hour lecture on it, but I would start by saying this. Every level of government has its place for what they do, and there are certainly times when certain topics shifted. So I’ll give, for example, topic of policy, which had been viewed for the longest time in California law as a purely local issue, right?
It’s up to local jurisdictions to decide the planning rules, the zoning rules, how cities build housing. And then we had a number of decades where we just didn’t build enough housing for the state of California. And we have seen of the past decade, a housing crisis that is unprecedented. We have seen record home prices, record rents, record eviction rates, record levels of homelessness, and it’s clear we’ve gotta build more housing.
The stat is a few years ago we had to build something like 3.5 million… and as the chair of the assembly housing committee for a number of years, I initially came to this issue with the perspective of a former local elected of, yeah, as a city we should be able to decide how housing happens. Then I go up to the state level, and I realize there’s a collective action. If we lead it up to every local jurisdiction to decide how they’re gonna… with housing, we’re not gonna address our housing… and so… housing has been toggling back and forth between local and state restriction.
That being said, there are over the centuries, there are areas of law that have been viewed to be in one sphere or another. I will give an example that’s very timely right now, which is public safety. There are claim laws, but by and large, criminal enforcement, law enforcement, happens at the state and local level, right? Cities have police officers, states have criminal laws. As a former prosecutor, I can tell you… criminal laws force prosecutors. And I would suggest there’s a really good reason for that, particularly at this moment.
You could imagine if all law enforcement were under control, we would be living in 1941, but because in 50 states and thousands of local jurisdictions, our local law enforcement are under the control of cities and states that understand our communities, that have the trust our communities, that entrust policy makers with how to put in policies to govern how local law enforcement behave.
So, for example, we expect… and expect them not to violate the civil rights of our constituents. I’m not sure you could say that about ICE. And yet this very issue of this tension between the feds and state, and locals on who is going to manage law enforcement is what is at the heart of the sanctuary city debate right now. Trump… all of your police officers, they ought to be mine. I have to be able to send them to capture anyone in the immigrant community that I want to, and we say in sanctuary cities, we believe in building trust with our communities. We believe that if immigrant communities actually… victims and witnesses of crime will come forth, criminals will be arrested… and sanctuary cities happen to have lower, better, if not superior, public safety rates compared to non… there’s not a simple answer to your question. Again, it depends on history, depends on precedent, it depends on the laws of the books, and how laws are interpreted. And these things change.
Hey attendees, thank you for being with us today. My name is Haiyan, and I’m an international student, and I’m doing the JSD program here at law school. And my question is about for the past two years, we have known that Trump Administration’s action is really fast. And even though the local government can take quick action and sue them in the court, it may still take a long time for the judicial process to really play out. And especially given the limited use of the preliminary injunction, a lot of people are heavily affected by the Trump Administration’s actions before the final rulings is out. And if the local governments take actions by themselves, for example, openly oppose the Trump Administration’s actions. For example, the Minnesota government doing this kind of thing, resisted the ICE actions. This may give a reason to the White House to carry out the Insurrection Act. How do we solve the problem of this, the efficiency problem of the judicial process, and do you think the White House will really carry out the Insurrection Act in the future? Thank you.
Simple question. I referred to muzzle velocity, beginning of my comments, and part of what is diabolical about the concept of muzzle velocity is jamming up the course. They know that our current judiciary has a certain capacity to be able to absorb all of these cases, and they’re moving forward, attacking 10 things a day, knowing that we can only litigate one or two of these things a day. At this moment, there are about 600 lawsuits that have been brought against the administration… to your point, these cases take them to work their way through the process, in which time the administration’s just off doing the next thing.
So, it provides a real conundrum. One that I know is incredibly frustrating to the bench itself. One, that’s frustrating to all of us who want the bench to do more, and where we know there we’re not gonna get more judges. Judges are stacked. When you have, for example, I just, the other day I was meeting with one of the, I think, 17 immigration judges in Bay Area that have been fired… right?
And so now, literally in the San Francisco Immigration Court, there are just a handful of judges. They literally are overwhelmed. They can’t process all the cases. Now that being said, this is why it’s also so important for us to be bringing cases because once we get a judge… and if we get a preliminary injunction or… that stays into effect… stays in effect for a period of time while a case moves through the process.
And so it gives us time and protection until cases move. A lot of folks have asked me, given where the Supreme Court is, aren’t you just… worried that you’re just starting litigation, and all 14-year cases are gonna get overturned? I just remind folks, whatever first-year law student knows, which is, it’s only a small fraction of all cases that felt level that actually are granted cert and go up to Supreme Court, even with the emergency special dockets.
So long-winded way to say it’s a concern, but we have been able to do an incredible amount of… with the cases of… with the objections. The last thing I’ll say is on the Insurrection Act. Obviously, from my perspective, this president doesn’t have the authority to use the Insurrection Act to come into cities like San Francisco on his whim because he doesn’t like us. But the way the law is drafted, certainly his attorneys would have… I really hope we don’t end up litigating this.
Thanks.
Hi. I know we’re close to time, but I was curious about what you were discussing about the coalition work you do with other city attorneys and perhaps other organizations, and what strategic decisions or considerations do you think about when deciding who should maybe bring a claim? I know you talked about strength in numbers, but I guess to provide more context, like prior to law school, I was involved in a civil rights organization where like some of the concern was like, oh, just by bringing this case, like particular plaintiffs may not be so sympathetic to particular courts who are, and I know you, you talked about the judiciary being independent, but sometimes like it doesn’t. There are things that can make particular plaintiffs less receptive to the court. Did that go into the consideration about who you think should bring certain cases, and what did that decision-making look like?
So obviously, we don’t have to think as much about the story of individual plaintiffs because we’re local jurisdictions from cities or counties, but one thing that I haven’t mentioned so far is, obviously, in different jurisdictions and in different circuits, there may be case law that is better for us… right?
And so depending on the facts, depending on the laws, we’re gonna rely on, we may choose to litigate an issue in different part of the country. Because we know that the First Circuit or the Fourth Circuit just has been… and then directly to your question around… if there are individual… stories, we’re absolutely fine saying, you got this. We’ll join in with a breach to support litigation brought by… organizations because we think they have a clear standing case. And just also say that when it comes to litigation, part of what we are also trying to… why the actions of this administration are not just violative of esotericism of vulnerable principles, but why does it matter to you as a person, and how we tell those stories to change the hearts and minds of Americans through our litigation. That’s… so we’ll have those conversations with friends… like if it’s more compelling to tell the story of the five-year-old who got arrested by ICE and litigate it that way as opposed to how the city blank or the city of blank litigate these cases, we’re happy to support. So we have a lot of those strategic conversations.
Thank you, David. Unfortunately, I have to rush him to a class right now, so he can’t stay in chit chat. We have a lot of great speakers coming… at lunch. Next week, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser will be here. So please come, more of these conversations, and thank you, David. That was wonderful.