Tonight in Your Rights: From Shakespeare's Dick the Butcher to Donald J. Trump

A judge blocks Trump's order targeting Perkins Coie, and Harvard's president responds to his "highly illegal" plan.

Donald Trump speaks before signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on March 6, 2025, including the one targeting Perkins Coie. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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A federal judge who presided over Donald Trump’s criminal grand jury investigations went Shakespearean on his executive order targeting Perkins Coie, striking down the order in its entirety in a 102-page memorandum opinion.

With sweeping historical scope, the ruling begins with the significance of a line from Henry VI: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

“No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” … When Shakespeare’s character, a rebel leader intent on becoming king, … hears this suggestion, he promptly incorporates this tactic as part of his plan to assume power, leading in the same scene to the rebel leader demanding “[a]way with him,” referring to an educated clerk, who “can make obligations and write court hand,” … Eliminating lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the path to more power.” (Citations omitted)

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell quoted from the late Justice John Paul Stevens on the true meaning of the widely misunderstood line: “that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”

Her ruling goes further in blocking Trump’s crackdown on lawyers than any other order before it. Other rulings left certain provisions in place related to the firms’ embrace of diverse hiring practices and the lawyers’ ability to obtain security clearances, where a U.S. president has broad powers.

Howell, on the other hand, blocked the order entirely.

We’ll go deeper on this soon. For now, read the full ruling here.

Possible Action Item: Naming and shaming

Georgetown Law students recently demonstrated the power of a spreadsheet, creating a more than 800-row database of firms that caved or stood up to the Trump administration’s bullying. The list became a recruitment headache for the capitulating law firms trying to woo students. See our coverage.

Protesters with signs stand around the John Harvard Statue in Harvard Yard after a rally was held against Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP)

Trump also threatened to take away Harvard University’s tax exempt status in his first social media post on Friday morning at 7:25 a.m. Eastern Time.

It took little time for Harvard’s president to respond in a way guaranteed to get Trump’s attention, within the pages of The Wall Street Journal — a corner of the Rupert Murdoch media empire where critical coverage of Trump routinely breaks through.

“If the government goes through with a plan to revoke our tax exempt status, it would…be highly illegal unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move,” Harvard President Alan Garber told the Journal.

Harvard sued the Trump administration late last month to prevent $2 billion in the university’s grants from being frozen.

For background: See this segment by the great Lawrence' O’Donnell, a Harvard alum, on Trump’s war against the university — the only night of the show where he sports the tie of his alma mater.

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