Like many other people, companies and powerful institutions, the partners of the law firm Elite Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom Boed to President Trump in a matter or weeks.
Size: In courage there are more than 250 people affiliated with the prestigious scholarship program of the firm, who have signed their names to a letter condemning the company to reach an agreement with the Trump administration instead of the bones of Fowtide’s bones were being in state before having been before it had been before having been before it had been before. Beentebeting has been the time that Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beenting Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beente Beting Be’s Be Be Be. Services to Trump’s political rivals. In the letter, which was written after the agreement, the current and previous fellows said that Skadden had betrayed the rule of law “to the service of autocracy” and implored their partners to leave the agreement.
“It’s never too late for Skadden to do the right thing. His courage will be worth it,” they wrote.
The notable voice letter for many Americans who do not share Trump’s vision for the country and have observed with increasing anger and pain as prominent institutions and people have given him or have not defended the values they said they defend. Others seemed to be grabbed by inertia. That growing anger is obvious in the results of the early elections, the growing protests and will go to the municipalities.
The coveted Skadden scholarship is a two -year program that pays the salaries of the boxes or recently graduated from the Faculty of Law that participate in legal works for free for Americans living in poverty. It is the work that many continuous Skadden fellows long after they leave communion. In his agreement with the White House last month, Skadden promised $ 100 million to causes that the administration supports.
Who stands
Isabel Flores-Hagan, a current Skadden fellow signed the letter, is providing legal representation to workers, largely to people UND and LGBTQ, through non-profit legal assistance at work. “It has allowed me to do the job that I have always dreamed of doing,” Flores-Hagan told me. She said both parents were activists. His mother, he said, was a teacher, and his father was a janitor of El Salvador who was once a labor organizer. “To find me in a position where you can do workers”, as special in communities that remind me of my father, it is significant. “
Flores-Gango said that her conscience forced her to speak. “As some of which benefit from this institution, I would feel convenient to remain silent.”
The decision of these people to speak is the last example of an unmistakable pattern. Three months after the second Trump administration, it is vividly clear that many of the Americans who refuse to retreat or remain silent are common people and daily workers: clergy and academics, teachers and scientists, artists.
At Columbia University, for example, school administrators made a series of changes last month to preserve $ 400 million in federal funds that the Trump administration has threatened to reduce. The University agreed to implement many of the Trump administration demands to restrict campus protests; Create a university definition for anti -Semitism; And place the Department of Studies of the Middle East, from southern Asia and African under a special administrator.
But students and the faculty have continued to protest. On April 4, the Police withdrew a group of students who demanded that school officials reveal if they had Trump administration officials attending the sentence of March 8 about the former graduate student of Columbia Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-palestinian activism on the campus. Many of the students who protested on April 4 were Jews and had chained themselves at the gates of the University.
In Skadden, the firm’s partners left Thomas Sipp’s moral clarity, a 27 -year -old Skadden associate left by the firm. “Skadden is on the wrong side of the story,” he wrote in an email by Tooleagues.
‘No one of note’
Among the alumni of Skadden Fellowship are some Americans with a high profile, including Matt Meyer, the governor of Delaware, who signed the letter. But most are private citizens that Americans have never heard.
“I am not one of the note,” said Lauren Koster, lawyer and former Skadden fellow that directs a small company that represents autonomous schools and non -profit organizations in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I asked him if he was afraid of speaking publicly.
Instead of fear, Sexton said that signing the letter had brought his relief. “There is this sense, strangely, of peace. I feel that this is the right thing, and there really is nothing that can shake from that,” he said. “No one comes to save ourselves; we have to save the Republic. Feel that, in my essence, it leaves no room for fear.”
Terry Maroney, a law professor at the University of Vanderbilt who served as Skadden fellow from 1999 to 2001, said she felt the obligation to speak because others had not done so. “I am a titular professor with a president appointed in a very elite institution,” he said. “I know that it does not protect me from being attacked, but I think it binds me to risk, especially when I see the people much more powerful who have much more influence than I do not, which enrages me.”
Several lawyers with whom I spoke expressed doubts that the letter would change the minds of Skadden’s partners. Anyway they added their names. They keep the most powerful people in the United States. But they had decided to say what they believed and do what they could.
Mara Gay is a member of the New York Times editorial board.
]