type: timeline_event
The Department of Justice filed appeals with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit around March 9, 2026, seeking to overturn district court rulings that had blocked President Trump's executive orders targeting four major law firms: Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner and Block, and Susman Godfrey.
The DOJ's brief argued that the district court judges had "bent over backwards" to invalidate the executive orders and that the orders were well within "presidential prerogative." The orders had sought to punish the firms through a battery of sanctions — revoking security clearances of their attorneys, denying their employees access to federal buildings, and directing federal agencies to refuse to engage them — because of lawyers they had hired or clients they had represented, including Trump adversaries and political opponents.
The appeals came after a brief and chaotic reversal: on March 2, DOJ had moved to voluntarily dismiss the appeals, only to reverse course hours later and reinstate them. The targeted firms described the about-face as an "unexplained about-face." The executive orders themselves had already spawned a wave of capitulation from firms that chose not to fight — agreeing to hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work and other concessions in exchange for not being targeted.
The litigation was widely viewed as a test case for whether the executive branch could weaponize the machinery of government against private legal actors based solely on their representation of disfavored clients — a direct assault on the independence of the bar and the right to counsel that critics called a step toward an autocratic legal system where access to justice depends on the political acceptability of one's lawyer.