By Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press
Washington (AP) – Judge Sonia Sotomayor said Thursday that lawyers should get up and fight against the battles to which the country’s legal system face, comments that come in the midst of attacks against federal judges and target by President Donald Trump of elite law firms in orders.
“Our job is to defend people who cannot do it themselves. And our work is to be the champion of lost causes,” she said. “But for the moment, we cannot lose the battles we face. And we need trained and passionate and committed lawyers to fight against this fight.”
Sotomayor did not mention the president when she spoke during an event in the national capital organized by a section of the American Bar Association, which was also targeted by Trump.
The remarks of liberal justice intervene one day after the conservative chief John Roberts defended judicial independence as necessary to “verify the excesses of the congress or the executive” during an appearance in Buffalo, New York.
Last week, judge Ketanji Brown Jackson strongly sentenced the attacks on the judges in his own speech. She did not mention Trump by name, but called threats and harassment “an attack on democracy”.
The country’s highest court weighs an increasing number of emergency calls from the Trump administration while its radical conservative program faces repression in the lower courts.
The president and his allies have slowed the judges who blocked parts of Trump’s agenda, sometimes with very personal attacks. Trump also targeted elite law firms for the work with which he does not agree, which led some to retaliate in court and others to conclude agreements with him.
The ABA continued Trump for federal subsistence of grants and Trump threatened the role of the organization in the accreditation of law schools for its efforts of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
