Law Students Keeping Receipts

Via BlueSky Social, I came across this spreadsheet maintained by a group of law students at Georgetown.

We are a grassroots group of law students who were extremely disappointed to see members of the legal profession—law firms, Department of Justice lawyers, members of the Trump Administration—completely disregard the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, legal ethics, and equal treatment and protection under the law. As law students make decisions about their careers, we thought it imperative to collect information about where law firms currently stand on the use of the federal government to attack lawyers, law firms, the legal profession, and freedom of speech and expression. We created this spreadsheet based on publicly available information to help law students make decisions that align with their values and to show those in the legal profession where their colleagues stand on such a critical and existential issue. If you have any questions or want to request an update to the sheet, please email [email protected]. This list was last updated on April 3, 2025 at 2:22 PM ET. We will be making updates regularly, but please be patient with us. We are law students doing this in our free time.

The students are collecting "information about where law firms currently stand on the use of the federal government to attack lawyers, law firms, the legal profession, and freedom of speech and expression."

The spreadsheet categorizes firms by those that "Caved to Administration," "Complying in Advance," "Stood Up Against Administration's Tactics," and "No Response."

For anyone teaching Professional Responsibility this semester, this might be an interesting resource for further conversations about the role of the lawyers as an "officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice."

Comments

[Anon]

Yes! Yes! Yes! Keeping upping the ante. This can ONLY end well and without any repercussions.

Do these students (and others) think they're going to place lawyers and firms under the panopticon or affect their brands?

Will they make publicly accessible their (ostensibly already public) data set along with the work showing how they applied the information to fit their four categories?

Will the full list of students participating in this project, and those who assist them, also be made public? Will others need to do the work of compiling such a list list, so that they're in turn placed under the panopticon? It won't be great for their career prospects, that's for certain, even with "sympathetic" firms.

Freedom of speech? After the Dems spent the last several years gutting it in the name of equity, DEI and inchoate normative "harm" just to advance identity politics? For those who have spent the last decade raping the Constitution, undertaking large-scale lawfare and abuse of the legal system to achieve certain political results at all costs (all while pretending to be the system's true defenders) this is rich. Once all these things are finally made plain and clear to the general public, lawyers, including academic ones, will be held accountable in ways that have never happened before. People from all walks of life and all sorts of politics can now see that those who often scream loudest about "justice" and "the rule the law" often are the ones who are the biggest threats to both. (How will your law school professional responsibility classes incorporate material on progressives' totalitarianism and systematic abuses of power to subvert and transform the legal system?)

Poor Dems. You aren't the defenders of the rule of law, democracy, republicanism, or even the truth. The overwhelming evidence proves that you're their rapists. You've spent nearly 40 years using multiculturalism and identity politics to engage in class warfare. Now that the working and lower-middle classes are abandoning you, which is unsurprising since your real aim is to destroy them and make a New America, you think you can retcon your views to claim to have always done otherwise. Your psychotic, hubristic, social engineering scheming is falling apart now. It's also being rejected across the Global South, so good luck trying to export your views ever again --including about sex and gender! It must also really hurt to have your dubious partisan political gains come undone (one you've mystified as being rule of law advancing or confirming).

Don't worry: you guys don't even breed, and your values and ideology will be completely gone in a few decades anyway. Progress indeed!

[anon]

Thank goodness that the Biden administration refrained from "going after" Trump's attorneys!
He led by the "power of example" and was, according to the folks on blogs like this and letters that are "oh so easy" to sign, beyond reproach and virtuous beyond belief.
Expected response (this is so easy to predict):
"BUT WE WERE RIGHT!"