‘Endangered lawyer’ day highlights US justice system’s plummeting standing

The US has been awarded a new dubious distinction: it has been selected as this year’s focus of an international coalition of legal groups and bar associations as a country where lawyers and judges are so politically intimidated that the rule of law is under threat.

The decision to put the spotlight on the US for Thursday’s “International Day of the Endangered Lawyer” underlines how rapidly America has plummeted in global esteem. For decades the US has been held up as a role model of a democratic judicial system.

Now, just a year into Donald Trump’s renewed presidency, it is widely seen around the world as a state in which lawyers and judges are attacked just for doing their jobs.

The “endangered lawyer” epithet brings the US into the company of dictatorships and autocracies that have been previous holders of the title. Last year’s focus was Belarus, while other highlighted states since 2010 when the annual event was created include Afghanistan, Iran and China.

The US was selected through a vote of more than 40 bar associations and lawyer organisations globally. A report released by the coalition on Thursday explained the decision by saying that members were alarmed by the Trump administration’s “sustained and co-ordinated campaign aimed at undermining the independence of the legal profession and the judiciary”.

It added that the past 12 months displayed a “troubling pattern of political intimidation and institutional destabilization unprecedented in the modern history of the US”.

Symone Gaasbeek, a co-founder of the coalition, said that it was surprising to find a country normally lauded for its commitment to democracy and justice added to the list of largely authoritarian countries. Speaking to the Guardian from the Netherlands, she said that “we look at the facts, we don’t deal in labels”.

Led by the facts, she said, “you see a systematic attack on the legal profession in the US. As the past year has progressed, those attacks have intensified – it has become more and more clear that the government is trying to control the legal profession and that the rule of law is threatened.”

One of the influences behind the coalition’s decision was the work of the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Margaret Satterthwaite. She acts as an independent monitor of the treatment of legal professionals around the world.

Over the past year Satterthwaite has raised mounting concerns about the actions of the Trump administration. She has sent two official letters to top US diplomats and the US state department objecting to the abusive treatment of American lawyers.

The first letter, sent a month after Trump’s inauguration, objected to the dismissal of scores of career lawyers from the Department of Justice. The firings were in apparent retaliation for their participation in earlier prosecutions against Trump over the January 6 insurrection and other alleged crimes.

The second letter, dated 6 May 2025, addressed the attacks emanating from Trump and his inner circle against judges who had ruled against the administration. Those assaults included Trump’s call for the impeachment of James Boasberg, chief judge of the US district court in Washington DC, after Boasberg blocked the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

The president called the judge a “radical left lunatic” and a “troublemaker”.

Satterthwaite told the Guardian that presidents were entitled to publicly disagree with court rulings. But, she said, “this kind of smearing is completely inappropriate”.

The UN rapporteur said that in other countries such verbal assaults had incited violence against judges. She pointed to the Philippines under the former strongman president Rodrigo Duterte.

In the US, scores of federal judges have endured a wave of violent threats in the wake of Trump’s rhetorical attacks. Several have been intimidated by anonymous pizza deliveries to their homes.

Satterthwaite said the ominous pizza deliveries were a “horribly good example” of the dangers of vilifying judges. “Attacking lawyers and judges for their work is a hallmark authoritarian move,” the UN monitor said.

She added that the administration had so far failed to reply to either of her official letters.

Donald Trump walks with the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, as he visits the Department of Justice to address its workers on 14 March 2025. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters

Tension between the executive branch and the judiciary has been a feature of both Trump’s presidencies. In his first term, the administration was partly frustrated in its policy ambitions in areas such as immigration and law enforcement by hundreds of lawsuits pursued in federal courts.

That confrontation has only intensified in the second term. A litigation tracker curated by the Just Security website is currently following 585 legal cases involving the administration.

As the clash continues, some of the territory has shifted to Trump’s advantage. He has benefited from largely favorable temporary rulings from the US supreme court, facilitated by Trump’s own three appointments to the top bench which sealed its hard-right majority.

Trump’s aggressive approach to filling seats on federal courts during his first term is also paying dividends in the appeals courts. A recent New York Times analysis found that the 54 appellate judges picked by Trump during his first four years in the White House have sided with the administration in an overwhelming 92% of recent cases.

Federal courts continue, though, to act as a last bastion against Trump’s anti-democratic onslaught. The newly released Endangered Lawyers report chronicles the many different ways that the president has stepped up his attack on lawyers and judges.

He has unleashed a raft of executive orders targeting specific law firms considered to be acting on behalf of Trump’s enemies or opponents. Firms such as Perkins Coie and Jenner & Block were threatened with the removal of all federal contracts, scrapping security clearances for their lawyers and barring them from entering federal facilities.

The UN rapporteur said that such an attack on private law firms was unprecedented and dangerous. “Lawyers are meant to represent their clients without them being seen as aligned with those clients. There’s a reason for that: so that everyone has access to a lawyer.”

The endangered lawyer coalition warns that there is a “chilling effect” on legal advocacy. Law firms and individual lawyers who represent marginalised clients in cases involving immigration, LGBTQ rights or Palestinian activism are finding themselves under intensified scrutiny.

At the same time, prosecutors are under growing pressure to conform to the political agenda of the White House. The 50-year norm that has shielded the justice department from presidential interference, dating back to Watergate days, has been shattered by Trump.

As an example of the weaponisation of the justice department, federal prosecutors stepped up their investigation of leading Democratic officials in Minnesota on Tuesday amid the ongoing immigration tussle with ICE. The governor, Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, and several other top state Democrats were served subpoenas in what Frey said was a “crackdown on local voices” of opposition.

Trump has also expanded his war against lawyers beyond US borders. He has used executive orders to impose sanctions on 11 judges on the international criminal court at The Hague.

The president said the moves were in response to the court’s investigations into US military conduct in Afghanistan and the Israeli war in Gaza.

Vânia Costa Ramos, president of the European Criminal Bar Association that is a member of the coalition, said she feared the sanctions would put a chill on lawyers working with the ICC. She said that it was critical for people in the US and around the world to resist the intimidation.

“If lawyers and all citizens don’t stand up and denounce abuses and bring them to daylight, then in a few years we could see the entire US justice system impacted in ways that would be very difficult to reverse.”

Costa Ramos said that a fundamental principle of any democracy was that lawyers should be free to carry out their work. “Whenever there is a climate of threats, sanctions, or bankruptcy it makes lawyers think twice before they even take a case, and that would mark the end of a free legal profession.”