We are living in a perilous moment for the American democratic experiment; an experiment that, from its inception, has failed to deliver on its promises of equality, inclusion, and justice for all. Today, we find ourselves in a time when the very legal structures intended to serve as guardrails against authoritarianism are being tested, strained, and bent to the will of those who seek power without accountability. As an attorney who has spent two decades advocating for vulnerable communities – whether in the courtroom, through international tribunals, within civil and human rights organizations, or by building coalitions across sectors and movements, including from within the walls of the White House – I have seen firsthand just how fragile our systems become when those entrusted to uphold the law instead choose to manipulate it.
A properly functioning legal system serves as a critical defense against tyranny. But what happens when that system is hijacked? When judges are hand-picked not for their jurisprudence but for their political loyalty? When laws are selectively enforced or weaponized against political enemies? We have entered an era where executive overreach is no longer scandalous—it is routine. It is strategic. The erosion of judicial independence, the rise of judge shopping, and the weaponization of our justice system for political gain should alarm every American, regardless of political ideology.
And let’s be clear: the American legal system was never truly built to guarantee equal rights or protection under the law. It was designed to protect property over people, status over equity, and whiteness over full democratic inclusion. It was never constructed to ensure democracy reached everyone. What we are witnessing now – this manipulation, this unraveling, this overt partisanship – is not the collapse of a perfect system, but the exposure of its original cracks. Cracks that were built into the foundation. Cracks that are now gaping open under the weight of modern authoritarian drift.
In recent terms, we’ve watched the U.S. Supreme Court function not as a check on executive power, but as its enabler – greenlighting expansive assertions of presidential authority, dismantling regulatory oversight, and elevating ideological agendas over legal precedent. In her dissenting opinion in Trump v. Casa, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a grave warning: “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution…is an existential threat to the rule of law.” She continued, “I have no doubt that…executive lawlessness will flourish.” This expansion of executive power through judicial fiat is not constitutional evolution, it is political entrenchment. And when the courts become rubber stamps for partisan interests, or worse, instruments of political retribution, we edge dangerously close to kangaroo courts: institutions cloaked in the appearance of justice, but rigged to deliver outcomes determined not by law, but by power.
The lawlessness we are now witnessing at home – the extrajudicial brutality, the militarized suppression of protests, the abduction of activists without process or accountability – is not an aberration. It is the escalation of a model we exported abroad. The post-9/11 Global War on Terror (or, more aptly, the War of Terror) normalized a framework in which legality was negotiable and fear justified everything. We kidnapped and disappeared people into black sites. We sanctioned torture. We carried out drone strikes and executions without due process. I know this because I represented the men who survived it. While we were told that those practices were confined to foreign battlefields, the infrastructure of impunity that was built was always destined to boomerang back home.
When I represented men detained at Guantánamo Bay, who were held for years without charge or trial, I learned that injustice doesn’t require a failed system. It only requires a system willing to bend to the will of unchecked power. And those same patterns of erosion are now clearly visible within our domestic institutions. A partisan legal system doesn’t merely harm its targets, it corrodes the legitimacy of the entire structure. And the result is a complete loss of faith in democracy itself.
This moment demands a reckoning. It is not enough to critique the system from the outside or to assume that change will only come from within. We need principled, courageous lawyers fighting on every front: inside government, on the bench, in community law offices, in nonprofits, in movements, and in the streets. We need zealous advocates who understand that the law is not merely a tool for order, but a covenant; a living promise of equity, justice, and democratic integrity.
For too long, law students have been taught that prestige lives solely in corporate law and firm life. But today, with the challenges we face, the highest calling of the legal profession is to protect and advance the rule of law across every sector of society. We need this fight everywhere: in courtrooms and classrooms, in movement spaces and corporate boardrooms. Because the law shapes everything, and we need lawyers with public service training and a justice-centered mindset leading the charge to build a legal system that centers people, not power.
That’s why we need advocates embedded in every space where power is exercised and justice is contested because that’s where the real battles are being fought: in legislative chambers shaping voting rights, in courts ruling on reproductive healthcare access, in advocacy campaigns defending immigrants, in oversight efforts demanding police accountability, and in movements advancing racial equity. It is in those spaces – public and private, grassroots and institutional – that we begin to build faith that the law can serve all of us, not just those with the wealth or influence to bend it to their will.
And when major law firms and corporations cower to the unlawful demands of the executive – whether out of fear, profit motive, or political convenience – it becomes even more critical to have lawyers who not only choose public service, but who understand the interconnectedness of power, law, and structural injustice. We need attorneys who can connect the dots: who recognize how the legal tools once used to justify indefinite detention or targeted killings abroad now echo in our domestic systems – in mass incarceration, over-policing, voter suppression, and systemic neglect. And we need those lawyers to translate that understanding into meaningful, strategic, and sustained change.
My own career, from representing victims of drone strikes in Pakistan to suing police departments in Virginia for excessive force, has taught me that systems do not change unless people demand that they do. I left private practice to work in the White House because I needed to understand the machinery of executive power. I needed to learn how decisions are made and how legal authority is exercised, so I could return to communities with not just outrage, but with strategy.
Now more than ever, we need a new generation of public interest lawyers who are unafraid to stand in the breach. Who understand that constitutional rights are only real if someone is willing to fight for them. Who know that justice doesn’t trickle down, it must be built, case by case, community by community, coalition by coalition.
We are at a crossroads. The legal profession can either become a servant of concentrated power or a shield for the vulnerable. I choose the latter. And I urge the next generation of lawyers to do the same. Not just because it is noble, but because democracy, equity, and the future of the American experiment depend on it.
