The 2020 Election is Breaking the Legal Profession

Sanctioning lawyers who are fighting to uphold the country’s election process is a great way to scare away competent, qualified, and strong ones from taking charged cases.

The Hill reports that a Colorado federal magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, “sanctioned lawyers who challenged the 2020 presidential election results, calling their election claims ‘fantastical.’” “Plaintiffs’ counsel shall jointly and severally pay the moving Defendants’ reasonable attorneys [fees]”—which is very likely to be many thousands of dollars. This ruling comes while a federal district judge in Michigan, Linda Parker, considers imposing sanctions on attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, both of whom raised questions about the propriety of the 2020 presidential election. 

In January, James Boasberg, a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., “referred a Minnesota lawyer [Erick Kardaal] for potential discipline” for his lawsuit regarding the last election. And these three proceedings occur in the shadow of the sanctioning of Rudy Giuliani by a New York state appellate court, which saw fit to suspend his law license for representing his client, then-President Donald J. Trump, in the wake of the 2020 election. Giuliani likely will face “permanent sanctions” at the conclusion of the process.

These are deeply troubling developments. Even the Bush v. Gore saga didn’t generate such official acrimony.

Attorneys in every state are duty-bound to offer zealous advocacy for their clients. This doesn’t mean that they can lie to the court or to the other lawyers involved in a case, or make a mockery of the process, but it does mean that they have an ethical obligation to press every possible good-faith claim in their client’s favor as hard as they possibly can. The American legal system is adversarial; therefore, a case’s legal soundness is only as good as the competition between the lawyers who appear before the court.

The Colorado magistrate and the New York appellate court both rested their decisions imposing sanctions on the alleged “threat” that the cases posed to the continuity of America itself; both cited the January 6, 2021 “insurrection.” (In Giuliani’s case, shockingly, almost none of the statements that the New York court cited as the basis for its sanctions ruling were things that Giuliani said in court filings or to the court itself; the vast majority were public utterances. First Amendment, anyone?)

Read the rest at American Greatness.