Law Prawfs Statement Regarding an Urgent Constitutional Crisis

Over 400 law professors have signed the Call to Urgency below.  The authors invite others to join in  here.

A CALL TO URGENCY

The opening weeks of the second Trump administration convince us, as law professors who have spent years studying the American legal system, that we are beginning to see unfold the gravest threat to the rule of law and its constituent principles – the separation of governmental powers, the independence of prosecutorial authority, the inviolability of human rights, the transparency of government action, and the sanctity of constitutional accountability itself – ever presented in our lifetimes. The president’s and his associates’ actions, and threats of action, profoundly undermine the bedrock principle of our federal government system – that the Chief Executive and his agents are constrained by the United States Constitution. The fundamental guardrails of our constitutional democracy itself are threatened and notably battered. They are, as we write, at risk of complete collapse.

We recall that Benjamin Franklin warned, when asked by Elizabeth Willing Powell whether he and his colleagues had delivered “a republic or a monarchy,” that we have “a republic” but only “if you can keep it.” We hope that all Americans, and especially all lawyers, will recognize the gravity of this situation and will be prepared to answer that challenge with the urgency required in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Comments

[anon]

In 2020, the American Bar Association counted approximately 21,500 law professors in the US.
A someone once said, "I'm in the 2% that makes the top 98% possible."
It is so easy. Just click.
Feel good.

[A non]

What if the law professors' views aren't representative of the legal profession?

What if those law professors largely aren't respected by most of their peers globally, for good reasons?

Worse still, what if American law professors' claims regarding their own/supported actions, legal initiatives and constitutional law developments over the last few decades, as being rule of law compliant and democracy enhancing, are disbelieved by much of the rest of the globe? What if they're understood to really accomplish the opposite? Surely that can't be too hard to imagine (admit to) given that few other Western countries actually emulate those developments.

For those around the world who watched the last eight years of lawfare being rationalized and approved by quite a few law professors, how are they supposed to respect, or believe, the latter ever again? Just take the claim about "the independence of prosecutorial authority". How can someone write such obvious bullshit with a straight face?

As an aside, perhaps law professors shouldn't have over-used the word "crisis" over the last couple of decades to market their banal scholarship about relatively trivial matters...

Regardless, your efforts to mystify your partisan political preferences and schemes as being "what the constitution requires," "what the rule of law demands," and so forth, is dying in front of your very eyes. Your con-law-con-game is coming to an end.

What if you're really the bad guys? And what if the rest of the world knows it now?

[anon]

A non
WELL SAID!
What's worse?
These radical left activists are ruining the career opportunities of their students.
Instead of undertaking to restrain their rhetoric and respect the voters, they are encouraging students to support the "resistance."
This is especially shameful.
One wonders what actions they imply by "urgency."
They don't say.

[Anon Prof]

Good thing they opened comments on here, because I was starting to feel that law professors had a right to live and now I am reminded why we are beneath pond scum. These are the hottest takes of 2012. Keep playing the hits!

[wow, we stil get to post comments here]

Bought and paid for by US AID I guess!

[anon]

No, Anon Prof, the issue is "urgency."
Tell us, what does this mean: "[we] will be prepared to answer that challenge with the urgency required"?
How are YOU prepared to answer "that challenge"?
Will you just click on an email joined by just 2% of your peers, to signal your "ever so holier than thou" status in the vanguard, and then post snarky comments if anyone dares to question this?
Or, are YOU prepared to do more to "answer."
Please, tell us.
And, BTW, if you equate a "Right to Live" with reading a strictly censored nearly defunct website that limits itself mainly to music trivia from half a century ago, then so be it.
But again, perhaps you should just consider how out of it you may be.

[The King in Yellow]

When lawyers claim the mantle of heroic savior of democracy, I think, haven't they heard of Carl Schmitt? Trust us, we are lawyers, and therefore experts on "democracy".

[The King in Yellow]

And I forgot to add--how can you take seriously a call for signatures that contains a most basic "apostrophe s" error in the heading? I thought lawyers knew how to dot and cross.

[anon]

These folks aren't for "democracy." Just witness how they "accept the outcome of the election."
They are for getting their way, by any means.

[Oscar Wilde]

Lot's of cryptic comments here -- and the usual cynic. He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing

[anon]

Cryptic comment, Oscar. What does that cliche have to do with the subjects at issue?
The letter?
The "urgency"?
Seems that your comment demonstrates a cynical attitude toward discussion of these issues, with a meaningless insult thrown in, just to try to signal you are "keeping the faith."
What do you value, Oscar?
The 2%?

[anon]

The arrogance of the left never ceases to amaze.
They seem completely incapable of even trying to engage in a rationale debate. They believe that every opinion that differs from theirs is just so wrong it isn't worthy of even their acknowledgement.
Anything they believe is beyond dispute, and they themselves are beyond reproach.
What is the value of that posture, Oscar?
If you only hear and speak with those with whom you agree, this is what happens. The ability to debate atrophies and is replaced by rage that anyone could possibly challenge any of the orthodoxy (which is constantly changing, of course).

[Johnny f#$king Appleseed]

That's just not true, anon. They know their opinions are often BS. They just want to control discourses.

What is the value in doing so? To control what students learn and what the public hears. To shape public discourses according your preferences--even the language used--and to exclude ideas that would threat that control and the ability to shape the future (and control narratives about the past).

Your ideas about a marketplace of ideas, about dialogue, and about robust debate to reach the truth AREN'T their ideas. They never were.

Your problem, in addition to believing that they actually believed that stuff, is that you permitted them to call themselves "liberals" when they obviously weren't, and "progressive" as a smokescreen for socialist and communist. (Even some communists got away for years with calling themselves "liberal.") Hell, the right and center themselves even used those labels to refer to the left and still do.

Now, the totalitarians are out of the closet. Fortunately, at least, there's no going back in for them.

[Johnny f#$king Appleseed]

Keep up the censorship, totalitarians.

[The King in Yellow]

It's fun to go back in time and remember the totally ineffectual efforts by law professors in the past to fight the good fight against trump via online letter. For example, "We, the undersigned legal scholars, have concluded that President Trump engaged in impeachable conduct."

https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/12/06/hundreds-of-law-profs-declare-trumps-conduct-clearly-impeachable/?slreturn=20250216-42828

"Clearly" is the give-away. No credible law prof thinks the law "clearly" says much of anything. I wonder what the overlap is between signatures on that letter and signatures on the current one?

[anon]

King
Yes, these "defenders of democracy":
1. Encouraged keeping T off the ballot on a theory so specious that the SCOTUS threw it out 9-0;
2. Encourage packing the Senate, by unconstitutionally admitting DC as a state;
3. Propose packing the SCOTUS, by way of unconstitutional term limits and increasing the number of judges on the court; and
4. As you point out, encouraged impeaching T twice, on mainly frivolous grounds (a phone call?), once after he left office (in order to set up the argument to keep him off the ballot).
What is truly amazing, at present, is the howling already about "constitutional crisis."
They have "accepted the results of the election" in their own, sort of nauseating way.

[Johnny f#$king Appleseed]

From a related blog:

The ABA is "establishment liberal, not "leftist" or "radical left-wing..."

LOL. Case in point about language abuse.

John Bingham: "...Why should it not be so, now that all are free?"

In the mid-19th century, Bingham couldn't have imagined millions of people, including people who are hostile to America, having anchor babies. Had he known how the rule would be used in the 20th and 21st centuries, Bingham would not have offered such unqualified remarks. (Hell, he might have changed his mind dramatically about the 14th Amendment's language too.)