Letters to the Editor | April 27, 2025

As Donald Trump ramps up his attacks on the bench and the bar, I keep picturing my late law professor, Georgetown University’s Richard Alan Gordon. Despite our different views on politics and culture (though we both loved Gilbert and Sullivan), professor Gordon’s soul-deep faith that the law is “a noble profession” resonated with me. I still remember, some 50 years later, professor Gordon’s almost physical pain in recounting the collapse of the bar and the bench during the Nazis’ rise to power, and his sense of shame that the noble profession of the law could break so ignominiously.

I am grieved at the surrender of law firms like Paul, Weiss and Skadden. Unfortunately, they are not alone. I am heartened by the courage of the lawyers at Keker, Van Nest & Peter. Their risk is consequential. Their question is likewise consequential. Who will join them? Clearly, we have seen there are consequences to standing against Trump’s authoritarianism. Still, 249 years of the American Experiment of representative constitutional democracy are at stake.

I am likewise heartened that Dean William Treanor, of my alma mater, was one of the original signatories of a letter circulated to deans of law schools opposing the administration’s action against the bar and bench. A shocking number of the nation’s top law schools declined to sign the letter prior to publication.

As the Trump administration continues to tighten screws against those institutions that are the pillars of our democracy, such as the law, the press, education, and our civil service, let us hope they respond with tenacity to uphold our constitutional democracy with integrity, and that they remain devoted to principle even in the face of threats and vicious reprisals.

Rabbi Avi Winokur, Georgetown University Law Center, Class of ’76, Haddonfield

It sounds unbelievable: A president, who just so happened to attend an Ivy League university, is making it his mission to destroy the nation’s top institutions of higher learning and shut down research initiatives at renowned colleges to make a point that no one should criticize him or his administration. The idea that education becomes a personal threat to a government official, least of all a president, is a scarcely credible mischaracterization. In so doing, the government has reached the point of searching for mind control, and seems determined to mete out severe punishment for analytical thinking. Harvard, as well as other schools, will now have to go to great lengths — and incur great expenses — to fight off government intrusion, which instead should be giving 100% encouragement for making this a better society. I would doubt Christian colleges will need to oppose the Trump administration.

I read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 recently, which was a prescient description of what a true dictatorship would resemble. Books were banned, and firemen were employed to destroy them. The former has already occurred, but what about the latter?

Harry Orenstein, Upper Gwynedd

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