The Fall of the American Legal Profession

AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan

From students and faculty shouting down federal judges on law school campuses, to politically motivated prosecutors engaging in bogus persecutions of former presidents, to the continued politicization of the American Bar Association, the integrity and credibility of the legal profession in the United States has taken a severe battering in recent months.

In early March, the American people witnessed yet another humiliating display of campus leftism and ideological censorship when Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit was vulgarly shouted down by a mob of students at Stanford Law School who refused to let him proceed with his prepared remarks. To make matters worse, the Law School’s associate dean, rather than restoring order at the event and disciplining the agitators, joined in the circus, confronting Judge Duncan with prepared remarks of her own. “For many people here,” the dean lectured to the judge, “your work has caused harm.”

One of the most alarming aspects of the incident is that it occurred at Stanford – the nation’s second-highest ranked law school – from which many students have gone on to positions of prominence as legislators and  judges.

The debacle at Stanford is far from an isolated incident. Although the American legal profession for a time resisted the tides of social, cultural, and political activism—even as the progressive movement co-opted other longstanding American institutions—it now appears that our nation’s legal system is the latest domino to fall to the left-wing activist class.

Nothing reflects the decline of the legal profession quite like the corruption of the American Bar Association (ABA).

Despite purporting to be a nonpartisan entity, the ABA has for years publicly taken leftist positions on hot-button political issues like abortion, same-sex “marriage,” affirmative action, and Second Amendment rights. It has also released blatantly ideological assessments of judicial nominees in a transparent attempt to undercut the legitimacy of conservative judges.

Even going as far back as 2006, a Wall Street Journal editorial lamented the ABA’s “long history” of “ideological sandbagging.” A 2012 study in Political Research Quarterly similarly found “strong evidence of systematic bias in favor of Democratic nominees” in the ABA’s work in the judicial selection process. According to Northwestern University law professor John McGinnis, the ABA continues to levy power by tightening the left’s grip on our legal system “chiefly through its influence in accrediting law schools.”

But the politicization of the American legal system does not stop there. The ABA’s hard shift to the left has also bled into state and local bar associations—resulting in a series of manifestly partisan decisions that further chip away at the legitimacy of our legal system.

In late 2021, Paul Sperry reported in Real Clear Investigations that Kevin Clinesmith—a former FBI lawyer who in 2020 pled guilty to defrauding the court by falsifying a surveillance document in the Russiagate investigation—was restored by the District of Columbia Bar Association as an “active member” in “good standing,” even though he had “yet to finish serving out his probation as a convicted felon.” The panel that reinstated Clinesmith, overseen by Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton Fox, is “a former Watergate prosecutor” and “a major donor to Democrats, including former President Obama,” Sperry found.

“The D.C. Bar’s treatment of Clinesmith, a registered Democrat who sent anti-Trump rants to FBI colleagues after the Republican was elected,” writes Sperry, “has raised questions from the start.”

Of course, lawyers regularly lose their legal licenses for significantly less than the crimes committed by Clinesmith. In fact, the same D.C. Bar panel that reinstated Clinesmith, even in spite of the fact that he pled guilty to a federal crime, suspended the law license of former New York City mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani—who has been neither charged with nor convicted of a crime.

How can Americans possibly maintain trust in our justice system when our nation’s most prominent legal entities are persecuting their political opponents while simultaneously protecting people convicted of federal crimes?

Regrettably, the politicization of bar associations is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the decline of the American legal profession. Troves of left-wing general counsels and legal staff at federal departments have also gone rogue, running roughshod over the law in favor of furthering their partisan goals. Federal prosecutors and district attorneys in cities run by Democrats routinely turn a blind eye to violent crime happening right under their nose—jeopardizing public safety and endangering the lives of American citizens.

In the most obvious example of soft-on-crime, politically-motivated prosecution, Alvin Bragg—the Manhattan district attorney who indicted Donald Trump on spurious-at-best legal charges in an act of barefaced political retribution—willingly allows violent and hardened criminals to roam free.

And of course, leftists working in the field of constitutional law have now entirely surrendered to the interpretive methodology of “living constitutionalism,” which purports that the U.S. Constitution and existing legal statutes should be cast aside in favor of whatever legal outcome is most amenable to progressive activists.

From the moment of our country’s inception—and from the very onset of Western civilization—the rule of law has stood as the hallmark of a free, functioning, and flourishing society. As such, the ideological infection of the U.S. legal profession poses a severe threat not only to the stability of the American justice system, but also to the principles enshrined in our nation’s founding and the future of Western civilization itself.