Expert Report of Professor Roy D. Simon, Jr.

Key Excerpts

• In my professional opinion, the President’s Executive Order, if permitted to stand, will have numerous adverse consequences that will threaten or undermine the fundamental principles of our system of justice.
• Given that deep trust between a lawyer and a client is the bedrock of a productive attorney-client relationship, using executive orders to penalize and restrict law firms that have the courage to oppose the President will remove from the legal marketplace many law firms that clients have come to trust in the past and that clients would be likely to seek out in the future.
• No person is above the law. Yet if the President of the United States—now or in any future administration—has power with the mere stroke of a pen on an executive order to penalize, vilify, and impede lawyers whose clients are opposing the President or the President’s allies or supporters (or to penalize, vilify, and impede lawyers whose clients have opposed the President in the past, or who seem willing or likely to oppose him in the future), then upholding the Executive Order at issue here would effectively place the President above the law.