The Rule of Law in Crisis—At Home and Abroad

When UNC Greensboro and Elon University’s School of Law held a joint symposium on the rule of law Monday, it shouldn’t have been remarkable.

But David Levine, associate dean and professor of law at Elon, felt compelled to point out it was.

“[Legal scholar] Mark Lemley at Stanford [University] has been a mentor and colleague,” Levine said. “And he said, ‘Institutions need to stand for truth now more than ever’—and that’s what this has been about.”

“Everyone has opinions,” Levine said. “But we focus here on facts and evidence. I will also add that it’s particularly important, given the world that we’re in now, that private institutions and public institutions work together now… It’s essential that those in education, those in fields where we have a public-facing role, stand together in times like this.”

Levine spoke in a cautious, elliptical, one might even say lawyerly manner. He was careful to say he wasn’t speaking for Elon or its law school. But everyone in the lecture hall knew what he meant by “now more than ever,” “the world that we’re in now,” and “in times like these.”

He was talking about the administration of President Donald Trump, which has spent the last four months defying court orders, deporting people without due process, having federal agents board Amtrak trains to make passengers prove their citizenship, revoking the visas of international students without explanation and punishing museums and universities—public and private—for “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology.”

In February, the American Bar Association was moved to release an unprecedented statement in which it called on the government to “follow the rule of law, protect due process and treat individuals in a way that we would treat others in our homes and workplaces.”

Monday’s symposium, divided into two panels, wrestled with how that statement became necessary and what comes next.

The first, on the rule of law in the United States, was moderated by Levine and featured Mark Elliott, associate professor of history at UNCG; Cheri Beasley, former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Professor at Elon; and Steve Friedland, professor of law and director of the Center for Engaged Learning in the Law at Elon.

The second, on the rule of law internationally, was moderated by Omar Ali, dean of the Lloyd International Honors College at UNCG. It featured Jerry Pubantz, emeritus professor of political science at UNCG; Maria Gonzalez, a local community leader; and Sara Ochs, associate professor of law at Elon.

One of the more disturbing things to see since Trump took office again in January, Friedland said, is what appears to be the systematic dismantling of the checks and balances on which America has come to depend.

“We have, even within the executive branch, independent operators,” Friedland said. “The inspectors general, who were actually in there for the last 20 to 30 years, their job was rooting out waste, being independent and saying, ‘Here’s what this branch should be doing better.’ We now have what we know as DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency], in which we have someone from the outside, and they fired all of these independent operators. And so what we’re missing is those checks and balances.”

Everyone from a fired federal worker to someone facing deportation has due process rights under the law, Friedland said. Compressing that process for the sake of “efficiency” runs afoul of the rule of law when that compression essentially does away with due process altogether, he said.

Beasley agreed, saying what is going on now is “not sustainable.”

“I do believe that the fact that you have judges that have been appointed by Republican presidents, and judges who have been appointed by Democratic presidents, all essentially ruling consistently that the folks who’ve been deported must have and do deserve due process, that stands for a whole lot,” Beasley said.

The near uniformity of the court rulings, even from judges appointed by Trump himself,  “speaks volumes,” Beasley said.

“The fact that courts are doing what they’re supposed to be doing does matter a whole lot,” Beasley said. It also puts a spotlight on Congress not providing the checks and balances it should, she said.

The Trump administration appears to be courting the sort of showdown with the courts that will provoke a constitutional crisis, several of the panelists acknowledged.

As far back as 2021, Vice President JD Vance, then running for a Senate seat in Ohio, said Trump should start a second term by firing “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

That sort of emphasis on loyalty to a political party of person rather than the ideals of government and the rule of law is a red flag, panelists said.

If courts rule against the administration, Vance said, Trump should take a page from President Andrew Jackson and say, “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Elliott, who teaches history, said Vance’s Jackson quote is likely apocryphal. But it’s a telling and confrontational misunderstanding of history.

“The U.S. Marshals Service is supposed to enforce these decisions,” Friedland said. “Problem is, the U.S. Marshal Service is controlled by the executive branch. So we’ll see, coming up, what’s going to happen. I think there will probably be some face-offs, there will be rhetoric, but the question is whether it’s going to go beyond the rhetoric.”

On the world stage, the panelists said, the administration has gone beyond rhetoric in the imposition of tariffs—but is also, with its rhetoric, playing a dangerous game that threatens the balance of international relations and respect for international law in place since World War II.

The United States has always been willing to violate international law when it was in its interests, Ochs said. But generally, the government takes great pains to justify its violations or to argue that they are not technically violations at all. Presidents who enter the fray—from George W. Bush’s scheme to detain people at Guantanamo Bay to Barack Obama executing suspected terrorists with drone strikes—generally face pushback, sometimes from within their own party or constituency.

“I see President Trump making claims about turning Gaza into a Riviera, or taking control of Greenland, or making Canada the 51st state,” Ochs said. “All of which would be very, very flagrant violations of many of the four definitional principles of international law—all with very little pushback.”

We could be seeing a government that intends not to recognize those principles at all, she said.

In the end, most of the panelists said they remain optimistic in the face of the Trump administration’s stress testing of American democracy and the rule of law both at home and abroad.

In the end, Pubantz said the voice of the American people matters and they make it known through elections—local, state, and federal.

Trump’s repeated rejection of the outcome of elections and questioning of any electoral outcome he dislikes may be largely unprecedented in American history. But, Pubantz said, it is still an indication that America is not as far along the path of authoritarianism as many other nations.

“In other countries, the leader wins with 99.9 percent,” he said. “They don’t have to reject the outcome.”

Outside monitors may inspect those votes and find they couldn’t possibly be accurate, he said—but that ceases to matter in truly authoritarian societies.

“They never claimed they lost, or tried to overturn it in court,” he said. “Because they already controlled the levers of power.”