Trolling the rule of law: presidential lawfare, the Stalingrad Defense, and the lawyers

This paper is part of a symposium on the legal ‘Stalingrad Defense’, and the ethics of using it in defense of a former national president facing serious accusations. I focus on the lawyers representing Donald Trump. The Stalingrad Defense consists of contesting every issue in order to drag out proceedings. It teeters on the edge between abuse of legal process and zealous advocacy, and the paper shows that the organised bar is quite ambivalent about it. Here, the complication is that Trump made clear that on returning to power he would use his control over the Department of Justice to shield his loyalists from investigation and prosecution and take vengeance on his enemies. The article discusses several prominent examples. The chief ethical question is whether lawyers have a special obligation not to undermine the rule of law that the president’s lawyers have violated. The article answers yes, based on the theory that lawyers are trustees of the rule of law, in a sense defined in the article. Knowingly or recklessly helping the president assault the rule of law violates that trust.