This document features the amicus brief filed July 20, 2026 in United States v. Fox, a case in the federal district court for D.C., by a group of roughly eighty legal ethics scholars and practitioners — law professors, former disciplinary counsel, and past bar association presidents — represented by the Democracy Defenders Fund and Lawyers Defending American Democracy. It supports the defendants’ motion to dismiss. The underlying dispute is the Justice Department’s lawsuit against D.C. disciplinary officials over the pending bar proceedings against Jeffrey Clark, the former DOJ official whom the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility has recommended for disbarment. The amici frame that suit as one piece of a broader DOJ effort — alongside its amicus filing in Clark’s own disciplinary appeal and a proposed rule published in March 2026 — to remove its attorneys from oversight by the state and D.C. courts that license them.

The core argument is that the DOJ’s Supremacy Clause and Article II theories cannot survive contact with the statutory framework Congress actually built. The brief traces judicial licensing and discipline of lawyers back before the founding, citing Leis v. Flynt, Ex parte Garland, and In re Snyder, then points to three congressional enactments: the 1970 Court Reform Act empowering the D.C. Court of Appeals to set and enforce conduct rules for the District’s bar, passed under Congress’s plenary authority over D.C.; the requirement that DOJ attorneys hold an active license in good standing; and the 1998 McDade Amendment, which subjects government lawyers to state rules “to the same extent and in the same manner” as everyone else. Because D.C.’s regulatory authority is itself a creature of federal statute, the amici argue, there is no federal-versus-state conflict to preempt, and nothing in the President’s duty to see the laws faithfully executed authorizes the Attorney General to carve his lawyers out of ethics rules — a point courts made when they rejected the 1989 Thornburgh Memorandum and struck down the 1994 Reno Rule.

The remaining sections address the DOJ’s framing and the choice of forum. The legislative history, the brief argues, shows Congress passed McDade precisely to foreclose the position DOJ now advances, and later declined both to route complaints through the Attorney General first and to adopt a proposed exception for state rules that interfere with federal policy. The claim that D.C. is “weaponizing” discipline is answered with a walkthrough of the process’s procedural safeguards — a sworn and specific petition, notice, counsel, cross-examination, hearing committee findings, board review, and ultimately review by the D.C. Court of Appeals — all of which Clark has used. Exempting DOJ lawyers, the amici warn, would create a category of attorneys effectively beyond ethical accountability, which matters most for lawyers who advise the government’s most powerful officials. Finally, they argue the department already has a proper channel for its objections: it may file an amicus brief in Clark’s appeal as of right, and in fact did so in October 2025, making this separate suit an improper collateral attack on a court’s authority over the lawyers it licenses.

Read it here.