Russell Bell has posted Executive Overreach and the Assault on Judicial Independence: Constitutional Analysis of Presidential Targeting of the Legal Profession on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This study documents a constitutional crisis unfolding in real-time: systematic presidential targeting of law firms represents the first coordinated assault on judicial independence in American history, culminating in documented constitutional violations across First Amendment, Due Process, and Separation of Powers clauses. Through empirical analysis of the American Bar Association’s landmark lawsuit (June 16, 2025), documentation of unanimous judicial rejection across four federal court cases, and real-time constitutional crisis analysis during active executive intimidation campaigns, we reveal how the “Law Firm Intimidation Policy” creates constitutional violations through financial coercion ($1 billion in extracted settlements), professional intimidation (documented chilling effects), and democratic process corruption (bypass of constitutional constraints through manufactured urgency).
We establish a novel Constitutional Coercion Doctrine Framework extending established federal-state coercion principles to private entities exercising constitutional rights, demonstrating that law firm targeting presents exponentially stronger constitutional violations than traditional intergovernmental coercion. Our analysis reveals systematic threats to the Sixth Amendment right to counsel: targeting creates professional dependency that structurally impairs access to legal representation, as documented in United States v. Stein (2008) and applied in Perkins Coie LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice (2025). When government pressure forces firms to decline representation to avoid retaliation, the constitutional guarantee of effective counsel becomes practically unenforceable, destroying constitutional safeguards essential for democratic accountability.
The June 27, 2025, final judicial ruling striking down the fourth executive order provides real-time validation of our constitutional framework, with documented instances of executive overreach following historical authoritarian consolidation patterns identified in comparative democratic backsliding scholarship. We argue that immediate implementation of constitutional resistance methodology represents both democratic necessity and emergency framework for preventing authoritarian consolidation through systematic targeting of legal profession independence. This analysis addresses critical gaps in constitutional law literature by documenting constitutional violations warranting potential criminal investigation while establishing empirical validation through real-time judicial resistance analysis during active governmental constitutional assault.