We have hundreds of years of this really strong web of organizations and businesses and universities and medical institutions, all these sectors of our society that kind of stand with some amount of independence from the government. And what the Trump folks are doing is threatening all of them, trying to cow them into submission by targeting a few of them, kind of picking them off one by one. It's been Trump's strategy from the very beginning. It's why he's a bully, right? You take one person, you make them the target, and then everybody else has to watch. And what is coming across in this attack on, it's now there are four different firms that have been specifically named, is that everybody else is just kind of standing by. And then you have exactly the chilling effect you're talking about. You not only have the targeting of these major law firms, but you have the fact that all these bystanders have not acted. And then you actually have a real, I think, act of capitulation from Paul Weiss, which is this, you know, the biggest firm that Trump went after decided to cut a deal rather than challenging these, obviously, I think, illegal actions in court. Now, we also have this counterexample of Perkins Coie, the first firm Trump went after, which is suing against his order. And so, you know, we'll watch that play out as well. But it's been not very much kind of standing up institutionally. And it's just this giant collective action problem, right? Like everybody individually is better off trying to duck and save their business, which was what Paul Weiss was doing. But then you don't have the kind of response that would actually put the whole thing to an end. I think. I think it could.

And it didn't, Emily, didn't you also have a situation in which not only did Paul Weiss not see its competitors and colleagues in the business rush to its side, but in fact, they felt, and obviously this isn't Paul Weiss's interest to say this out loud, but let's take them at their word for the moment, that they felt their competitors not only would not rally to defend them, but that they saw that their competitors saw this as an opportunity to pick up the business and snag the lawyers from Paul Weiss by their competitors if they actually took on the Trump administration. Yeah,

I mean, if that's true, I'd say it's pretty reprehensible. The firms that Paul Weiss accused of trying to take its business then denied it, so it's a little hard to tell. But the other thing to say here is that it's not like Paul Weiss tested this premise. It is possible that its whole business could have collapsed, but this is a law firm that does $2.6 billion worth of business a year. And so, you know, I think it's fair to ask, like, okay, if you really think the whole thing is going to crumble, but maybe you should have checked to see if, like, at the margins, you could have taken somewhat of a hit. And I'm relying here, especially on Bob Bauer, who was the White House counsel, one of them for Barack Obama, I should say, I think is a former partner at Perkins Coie. But, you know, he's been just clearly making the case that there is a way to stand up here that Paul Weiss didn't even try.

Why is it, do you think, Emily, that the law firms and the legal community in general did not find a way to band together or haven't found a way to band together? They do have the bar. They could form a bar. It is the bar. Why is it that they aren't able to do it?

Well, the ABA, the American Bar Association, actually has been putting out some pretty strong statements, so that's worth mentioning. I think there is this collision between the self-interest of the law firms and the desire to kind of protect themselves and maybe benefit in some way and this larger value. And, you know, frankly, it's the exact same dynamic that we're seeing among the universities. I mean, I know we're about to talk about that next, but they also have not made some big collective statement standing behind Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania that have had these big funding cuts threatened. So, you know, in both cases, there is a way in which these really important sectors and which claim to stand for these larger principles are just really failing to live up to that. And that's, you know, another kind of diabolical genius of President Trump. He calls people out. And then in the circumstances in which there's really something at stake, they fold. They are folding currently, a lot of them, not all of them, but some of them. And

the more fold, the easier it becomes for future people to fold, because it's like, what are you going to do that? We're just under everybody's under salt everywhere all at once, you know, so the collective action problem kind of gets turned upside down, and you become collectively exculpated, because everybody's under this pressure. And what you did is not such a great sin. And it seems to me it has a reinforcing effect for President Trump, who argues these norms and these big principles that you walk around with your high pants talking about, you know what, they crumble under the least little test. And so these measurements and these standards by which you say I'm falling short, turns out they're not that big a deal anyway. So your norms and your behaviors in the abstract that you judge me by are not that big a deal either. I

mean, and then we also see the way in which the federal government is just such a huge entity that, you know, the universities made decisions after World War II to take all this federal funding and the law firms, of course, they do a lot of business that involves the government and companies that contract with the government. But then when you have that intermingling, you see the vulnerability once the federal government stops acting in good faith. And that's part of this equation here. There's

a really good piece that I want to commend to everybody in The Atlantic and Jeff Goldberg's The Atlantic by Aziz Huck, who's a writer, I don't know, but it's really law professor. Great. America's watching the rise of a dual state and cast back to a writer who a Jewish writer who had been a lawyer in Nazi Germany in the early days and ultimately had left. I mean, survived and left and wrote a book about the rise of the dual state. And the dual state in this context is that for most people, and this is true in Nazi Germany and for a lot of states, like, if you can maintain a basically functioning legal system, property rights are protected, like regular crimes are prosecuted, that's really important. And that Nazi Germany actually was able to do that for most people in Germany. But then there is this tranche of people and who that is, you know, can be arbitrary and you can suddenly be stuffed into it at the will of the government whenever they decide. become totally arbitrary, capricious, cruel, heartless, you know, taking of property, taking of life, taking of liberty. And, but for, but most, most Germans actually never ended up in that world. It was just the disfavored few, few being millions, but still few compared to the majority of the society. And, and as long as you can kind of maintain that normality for most people, this cruel and brutal state, authoritarian state can survive. And he's saying like, we're witnessing perhaps an early version of that here. And sure felt like that way to me as I read that story.

Yeah, I'm really glad that you brought that up. I mean, one wonders in this what feels like a kind of slide toward autocracy or a potential slide, like what are the moments going to be where we look back and we really can see the turning points? And it's really hard to tell in real time, but it feels like we are moving in a dangerous, scary direction. Can

I just talk about this is not this is a more hilarious aside, which is I've now talked to two lawyers in the past couple of months who are involved in white collar law, and they're kind of perplexed, but for a totally different reason. So one one I talked to was somebody who was an environmental lawyer by which in this case he defended law defended that were accused of environmental malpractice, some kind of environmental malfeasance. The other was somebody who did Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, where you defend companies which are accused of manipulating or bribing people in foreign countries. Those are two big forms of white-collar law. They just don't have any work because the Trump administration is not putting any pressure on companies to abide by environmental laws.