Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Should We Stay Or Should We Go: Lessons From The Trump Administration, Kathleen Clark

Scholarship@WashULaw

After the 2016 election, commentators published a flurry of essays with advice on whether lawyers and federal officials should remain in government during the Trump administration. In this article, I review those essays, includ- ing Professor David Luban’s stern advice about the risk of remaining. I also discuss three key concepts from Professor Luban’s article for this symposium: desk perpetrators, desk mitigators, and operational maneuvering room, and explore how they apply to Trump administration officials who engaged in internal

resistance or principled resignation. More than one hundred federal officials

in the administration engaged in principled resignation, many acting in concert …