A federal judge ruled on Friday that an executive order President Trump signed in March targeting the law firm Perkins Coie was unconstitutional and directed the government not to enforce its terms, which had threatened to upend the firm’s business.
The ruling was the first time a court had stepped in to permanently bar Mr. Trump from trying to punish a law firm he opposes politically.
Skipping a trial and moving directly to a final ruling, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia wrote that attempts to bring the firm to heel under the threat of retaliation amounted to unlawful coercion, and imperiled its lawyers’ ability to freely practice law.
“No American president has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue,” she wrote, adding, “In purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’”
The lawsuit was the first of four similar cases to reach a resolution. Lawyers representing the firm had argued that the nature of the president’s order was so obviously coercive that minimal time was needed to assess its illegality.
They argued, and Judge Howell agreed, that the order clearly violated the First and Fifth Amendments, denying Perkins Coie and other similarly situated firms freedom “to think and speak as they wish” and equal protection under the law.
Starting in March, Mr. Trump issued a series of executive orders labeling as national security risks at least six major firms that had represented political opponents or whose lawyers were involved in investigations into the president during his first term.
The orders openly detailed Mr. Trump’s political grievances.
The one targeting Perkins Coie cited its past work with the liberal donor George Soros, whom conservatives have vilified. A similar order targeting WilmerHale complained that it had hired Robert S. Mueller III after he retired from his role as special counsel in the investigation, during Mr. Trump’s first term, into Russia’s election interference.
As a consequence of that past work, which the orders painted as a threat to the “national interest,” Mr. Trump directed the government to bar those firms’ lawyers from federal buildings, suspend active security clearances held by their staff members and cancel any government contracts that could steer taxpayer funds their way.
Faced with the prospect of sudden exile, firms began scrambling to broker deals with the president, agreeing to take on hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono legal work in order to duck the punishing terms. Mr. Trump celebrated the concessions, boasting that he had extracted close to $1 billion in free legal work for causes he favors, all as penance “for damages that they’ve done.”
But the president’s public browbeating of elite law firms, with the express intent of winning concessions, came as a boon for the handful of firms that instead opted to fight back in court.
Lawyers for Perkins Coie and WilmerHale told the judges presiding over their cases last week to look no further than the case of the Paul Weiss firm for proof of the White House’s true intentions with the orders.
They noted how the grave concerns about national security and the need for urgent reviews of security clearances stated in the orders appeared to evaporate the moment Paul Weiss agreed to cut a deal.
Paul Clement, a lawyer for WilmerHale, told Judge Richard J. Leon in a parallel hearing that the sudden retraction of the orders against Paul Weiss and others betrayed Mr. Trump’s real goal, and that the unstated message from the White House was so blatant it hardly merited discussion.
“The signal this sends to the whole bar is: Watch out. We’re watching. If you’re litigating against the government or you’re not litigating against the government, your behavior can be punished,” he said. “And there’s just no way to practice law under those circumstances.”
Other firms that had been targeted, including Jenner & Block and Susman Godfrey, have also asked judges in their cases to fast-forward to a decision.
Mr. Clement warned that the deals the White House was cutting undermined the profession as a whole.
“If I have to stand up here and argue in front of the court today with one eye on how this is going to be perceived by the executive branch and how that’s going to influence the interest of my other clients, well, I might as well go sit down,” he said. “That’s not how you can practice law.”
At the hearing in Perkins’s case, Judge Howell repeatedly asked Richard Lawson, a lawyer for the government, to speak to an expert opinion filed by J. William Leonard, a former Defense Department official who worked for decades overseeing security clearances, and who compared Mr. Trump’s orders with tactics Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had employed during the Red Scare.
In the opinion on Friday, Judge Howell wrote that the order ultimately “stigmatizes and penalizes a particular law firm and its employees — from its partners to its associate attorneys, secretaries and mailroom attendants — due to the firm’s representation, both in the past and currently, of clients pursuing claims and taking positions with which the current president disagrees.”
“In a cringe-worthy twist on the theatrical phrase ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers,’” she added, the order was more specifically, “‘Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,’ sending the clear message: Lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts.
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