In March and April 2025, the Trump Administration issued a series of executive orders directed at various law firms that had represented clients or undertaken actions with which the President disagreed. Those executive orders imposed various sanctions capable of destroying the firms financially. The Administration also threatened numerous other law firms with similar types of …
This report, prepared by the Coalition for the International Day of the Endangered Lawyer, designates the United States as its 2026 focus country, arguing that threats to the legal profession have become systematic rather than isolated. Drawing on international standards such as the UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers and the newly adopted …
The Malaysian Bar has welcomed the government’s move to separate the offices of the Attorney General and Public Prosecutor—a long-standing institutional reform aimed at strengthening the rule of law and prosecutorial independence—but cautioned that the proposed constitutional amendments may fall short without stronger safeguards and supporting legislation. Bar President Anand Raj stressed that the powerful …
In the United States, a CBS News “60 Minutes” investigation (broadcast June 7, 2026, at the edge of this reporting window) reported that federal judges who have ruled against the Trump administration are facing escalating intimidation, including death threats, “swatting,” bomb threats, and doxxing directed at them and their families. The program spoke with 26 …
Thirty-nine international legal and human rights organizations—including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists—issued a joint statement on June 5, 2026, condemning what they describe as the Tunisian authorities’ systematic and escalating campaign of intimidation, prosecution, and retaliation against lawyers, judges, and independent civil society, a pattern that has deepened since …
This ABA Journal column by Zamira Djabarova of the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights argues that attacks on U.S. courts and judges are now being measured against international human rights standards — the U.N. Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary and on the Role of Lawyers — that the United States …
Israel’s two most senior judicial officials—Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara—issued stark warnings on June 1, 2026, accusing the governing coalition of deliberately working to dismantle Israeli democracy through its assault on the judiciary. Speaking at an Israel Bar Association conference, Amit, who has been boycotted by the government since his …
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a House Appropriations subcommittee in June 2026 that the Trump administration has scrapped its controversial $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, declaring “we are not moving forward with the fund, period.” The fund—which would have paid people who claimed the federal government was weaponized against them—stemmed from a settlement of Trump’s …
Federal judges have increasingly accused Justice Department lawyers of dishonesty in court, marking a notable erosion of the longstanding “presumption of regularity” that allowed government attorneys to be taken at their word. In a series of pointed rulings in spring 2026, judges in Rhode Island, Chicago, Tennessee, and elsewhere called out department lawyers for withholding …
A New York Times analysis of federal employment data found that more than 10,000 government lawyers—roughly one in five employed at the end of 2024—have left since the start of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies struggling to carry out President Trump’s agenda. While agencies hired about 3,200 lawyers …