Not many non-lawyers have heard of the so-called ‘cab rank rule’ and yet it’s a bedrock principle of the common law world. In brief, this rule stands for the fundamental proposition that a barrister must take a case that is within his or her knowledge and expertise, provided that lawyer is not already fully booked up and is otherwise free to do so. More to the point, this applies no matter how unpalatable the client or the particular cause or argument being run might be. In basic terms, clients are entitled to the best legal representation they can afford and lawyers don’t get to avoid such clients because they don’t like their politics, their alleged behaviour or anything else along those lines. In fact, for many criminal lawyers (we have our doubts about the entirety of the ACT Bar after recent events but that is for another day) it is a point of professional pride scrupulously to abide by this cab rank rule. And the same basic presumption or proposition of any client being entitled to his or her best legal representation applies in those parts of the common law world – like Canada and the US – where the legal profession is unified and is not divided by regulation into the separate castes of solicitors and barristers.

Got all that? Because readers need that basic primer before we move to consider a particularly egregious instance of TDS – ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. You see, with the widespread attempts by the Biden Department of Justice to overwhelm their main 2024 opponent and likely Republican nominee with legal charges to try to take him out of the race this notion or presumption that lawyers take the client that walks in the door matters. And matters a lot. (Cards on the table, neither of us believes any of the indictments against Trump would have been brought against anyone else, ever, they are that weak – which is not to deny that in 95 per cent Democrat-voting Washington DC a jury might well convict him.)

But our main point is that you’d think by now that Trump would have assembled a crack legal team to fight off the avalanche of legal peril the Democrats are raining down on him. Yet you’d be wrong. Trump cannot get first-class lawyers, largely because of the seeming certainty of deep and serious legal, personal and career reprisals against lawyers who sign on to his team.

If you want a legal career, you can’t afford to work for Trump, that’s the message.

A Democrat-linked legal hit squad called ‘The 65 Project’ is largely to blame for what amounts to an attempt to deny Trump access to counsel, in the US this being a right that is even enshrined in the 6th Amendment. The 65 Project has personnel linked to the powerful Washington DC Democrat lawfare centre, Perkins Coie. Even Forbes, no Trump-supporting outlet, says the 65 Project is funded by ‘dark money’. And as you read this the 65 Project is seeking to disbar more than 100 lawyers in 26 states who worked on Trump post-election lawsuits. The two-year-old group, named after the number of Trump post-election lawsuits, has filed 79 ethics complaints, and while it claims to be bipartisan, it is reported no lawsuits have hit lawyers representing Democrats despite Democrats themselves questioning election results myriad times over the years including one Hillary Clinton. Managing director of the 65 Project Michael Teter explains this by saying in USA Today no one on the left manufactured facts in court to overturn an election.  That’s his outlook in a nutshell. The crime, as the Babylon Bee puts it, is ‘Questioning Election Results while Not Being a Democrat’.

Notice that the 65 Project mission is couched in Orwellian nicespeak. They are ‘defending democracy’ and holding ‘Big Lie Lawyers accountable… so that lawyers, including public officials who subvert democracy, will be punished’. But the line between a frivolous lawsuit and a merely weak one is not always clear – in fact, lawsuits with little chance of success are a dime a dozen especially in the US where, uniquely, there is no costs rule so that losers pay two-thirds of the winners’ legal costs.

Put differently, and as the saying goes, the absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence. High-profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz, himself a Democrat, cuts to the chase over what he calls the ‘nefarious’ 65 Project: ‘It’s a tactic. People will not take on Trump-related cases. That’s the intention and that’s the result.’

Dershowitz himself was targeted after defending Trump against what he says was an ‘unconstitutional’ impeachment in 2020, and in 2023 Dershowitz wrote, in a paper entitled ‘Why Trump cannot get a top-tier lawyer’: ‘I was cancelled by my local library, community center and synagogue. Old friends refused to speak to me and threatened others who did. My wife, who disagreed with my decision to defend Trump, was also ostracised. There were physical threats to my safety.’ Most long-time Trump associates bear similar or worse scars, financial, emotional and career-affecting, of this vicious targeting; Roger Stone, John Eastman, Rudy Guiliani, Jenna Ellis, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Steven Bannon, Peter Navarro and many more have all been dragged through the courts or are in the midst of financially ruinous lawfare. There is talk of personal harassment, nails in driveways, protesters outside lawyers and judges’ homes, as happened with the Supreme Court justices after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. These sort of ad hominem attacks sure look to us like naked intimidation. And this in the same country in which, as a young lawyer, the future second president of the US, John Adams, served as a lawyer for the defence in the trial of eight British soldiers accused of murder during a riot in Boston on March 5, 1770. Adams and the other defence lawyers got all the soldiers acquitted but two who were given token sentences for manslaughter. Adams remained proud of upholding the presumption of innocence and right to counsel his whole life.

S0 as much as we are both the most pro-American non-Americans going, this politicisation of the lawyerly caste is way worse in the US than in the Westminster common law world. The US criminal justice system is bottom of the class, to be blunt.

Few lawyers can afford to challenge this formidable, if despicable, onslaught against a presidential candidate’s legal rights. The result is another stacked deck against Trump. Trump conservative, the influential Charlie Kirk of youth organisation Turning Point USA, said on a recent podcast: ‘If you talk to any sophisticated lawyer, Donald Trump’s team is made fun of constantly… in serious legal minds a better legal team could crush these indictments.’ That’s the point for these 65 Project Democrats, isn’t it?  To get attorneys to walk away by threatening them with an ability to earn a living in the future and even to practise law.

It’s a dangerous game these partisan left-wing lawyers are playing. Public confidence in the legacy press has already cratered and, let’s be honest, it’s never been that high as regards lawyers. It took hundreds of years to build up the cab rank rule type thinking. It is crucial to a well-functioning legal system.

Be very glad Australia is nothing like the US on this one, seemingly trying to tear down a core foundational pillar of liberal democracy.