“On Not Signing Most Open Group Letters by My Fellow Legal Academics”

An excerpt from yesterday’s post by my UCLA colleague Stephen Bainbridge:

Last week, I signed an open letter to the Delaware legislature by a group of corporate law academics addressing aspects of Delaware SB 21, which was then pending before the Delaware House.

This week, as you may have seen, 80 out of the ~120 Harvard law school faculty signed a group letter protesting certain Trump administration actions–especially those targeting law firms–as being detrimental to the rule of law.

Predictably, where Harvard leads, the rest of legal education follows. I hear rumors of similar letters in the works at some law schools or among faculty at multiple law schools.

I have been asked to sign some. But I’m not going to do so.

First, however, let me emphasize that I share the signer’s concerns about the way the Trump administration is punishing law firms of which the administration disapproves. The use of unilateral executive action is inconsistent with the rule of law. This is true even though I think some of what some of the law firms did to incur Trump’s wrath was seriously problematic. In particular, Perkins Coie played a major role in commissioning and disseminating the Steele dossier, which has been widely and effectively discredited. In effect, they committed election fraud. Having said that, I believe Trump should have had the Justice Department investigate to determine if laws were broken rather than unilaterally imposing punishment by executive decree. If the Justice Department concluded laws were broken by the firm, then prosecute the firm. That is how the system is supposed to work. That is how the rule of law is supposed to work.

But I have three reasons for not signing a version of the Harvard letter….

Go to the post for those reasons.

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