BY KAREN SLOAN
The deans of Yale Law School and Harvard Law School have joined the growing chorus of lawyers publicly condemning President Donald Trump’s attacks on the judiciary.
In a blistering op-ed in The Boston Globe on Friday, Harvard’s Martha Minow and Yale’s Robert Post wrote that Trump’s Twitter-delivered insults against the federal judges who stayed his controversial travel ban risk making the president “an enemy of the law and the Constitution.”
“By questioning the legitimacy and authority of judges, Trump seems perilously close to characterizing the law as simply one more enemy to be smashed into submission,” the deans wrote. “At risk are the legal practices and protections that guard our freedom and our safety from the mob violence that destroyed democracies in the 1930s.”
Trump called U.S. District Court Judge James Robart, who initially stayed the travel ban, a “so-called judge” on Twitter. He then went after the appellate panel for leaving Robart’s order in place, calling their ruling “disgraceful,” among other comments. Last year, Trump accused the judge hearing a lawsuit over his Trump University of bias due to the jurist’s Mexican heritage.
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Last week, American Bar Association president Linda Klein lambasted Trump’s attack on Robart in a fiery speech delivered during the organization’s midyear meeting in Miami. “There are no ‘so-called’ judges in America,” Klein said.
“There are simply judges, fair and impartial. And we must keep it that way.”
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