Lawyers and presidential lawfare: Trump’s law firm executive orders

This article considers the presidential lawfare campaign conducted by Donald Trump in the first few months of his presidency against numerous large law firms. After first briefly considering the evolution of the term ‘lawfare,’ the article briefly recounts the effort by Trump to punish law firms that represented political opponents or clients taking positions with which he disagreed. The theoretical conclusion is that the political value of the rule of law, understood as a limitation on the arbitrary exercise of power, is more fragile than we may have believed prior to the second Trump Administration. The judiciary has some role in protecting the rule of law, but without a robust commitment to that value by government lawyers and the legal profession more generally, the risk of arbitrary presidential power is a serious one indeed.