President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting the legal community pose “a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself,” according to a court filing submitted Friday by more than 500 law firms.
The brief represents the most organized pushback to date against a series of White House executive orders that have sought to punish some of the country’s most elite firms and to extract concessions from them. Some of the targeted firms have sued to halt enforcement of the orders, while others have struck deals with the White House either to avert an order or to have it rescinded.
The filing was submitted as part of a lawsuit filed by Perkins Coie, which is among the firms that have challenged the orders in court. The order against that firm and others demands that security clearances of its lawyers be suspended, that federal contracts be terminated and that employee access to federal buildings be restricted.
A storied US agency, one that began under President Kennedy in 1961 with the aim of...
