When the law becomes a partisan weapon

by Aadi Mehta

Illustration by Sami Seyedhosseini, Photo Editor

One of the first things law students learn is that the law is supposed to limit the growth of power. We learn about separation of powers because presidents are not supposed to have unlimited authority. We learn about judicial independence because judges are supposed to decide cases according to law, not political pressure. We learn professional responsibility because lawyers have obligations to the legal system that extend beyond their personal beliefs or the interests of a particular party.

That is why the Trump administration’s relationship with the American legal system is so troubling to me. I am a first-year law student, and I started law school only a month ago. I believe the legal principles that are supposed to serve as neutral constraints on political power are increasingly being treated as partisan weapons. There is something deeply troubling about entering the legal profession at a time when the very principles we are being taught to uphold are being pulled into political battles. For those of us being trained to become lawyers, that creates a difficult question: What exactly are we being trained to uphold?

This is not to say politics and law have always been separated. Interpreting the Constitution has forever been contested, and politicians of both parties have criticized courts when they disagree with their decisions. But there is a difference between debating what the law means and using legal principles solely on whether they advance a political objective.

In today’s world, that difference is becoming hard to ignore. A 2026 UCLA Law and Bright Line Watch survey of federal judges, lawyers and law professors found that legal experts rated the state of the rule of law at its lowest point in at least a decade. 94% said President Trump’s second term was more threatening to the rule of law than his first, while 91% said it was more threatening than the Biden administration. Only 30% expressed confidence that the Supreme Court would make impartial decisions in cases involving the Trump administration, and 80% said federal officials often fail to comply with court orders during Trump’s second term.

These numbers matter because they come from people who work inside the legal system. The survey included 21 federal judges, 113 elite lawyers and 193 law professors, and the judges were appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. Therefore, the issue is not that there is one dominant group, but rather a growing concern among legal professionals about the relationship between political power and legal institutions.

For law students, that creates an unsettling gap. In the classroom, we are taught that constitutional principles are supposed to apply regardless of who occupies the White House. Outside the classroom, however, we increasingly see those same principles used haphazardly. Executive power can be legitimate when exercised by a president we support and condemned as dangerous when exercised by a president we oppose. Judicial independence can be defended when a court reaches a decision we favor and questioned when it does not.

The problem becomes even more apparent in legal education. In discussing constitutional law during the Trump era, Professor Eric Segall described the difficulty of teaching constitutional questions that may cause intense public anger without students interpreting legal analysis through the lens of partisan advocacy. That problem extends beyond the classroom. If students begin to wonder if every legal argument is just politics disguised as law, it becomes harder to believe in the very system we are being trained to serve.

Stanford Law’s discussions of the Trump administration have raised similar concerns about executive power, judicial oversight, the independence of the Justice Department and pressure on the legal profession. These issues raise an important question for future lawyers: Are we supposed to serve the political interests of those in power, or are we supposed to serve a legal system that can restrict those interests?

I believe the answer has to be the latter.

That does not mean lawyers should be apolitical, nor does it mean every legal question has one objectively obvious answer. Lawyers will disagree, judges will disagree and political institutions will nevertheless influence the development of law. That being said, disagreement is different from abandoning the idea that legal principles should apply consistently.

If separation of powers matters, it should matter when it limits our preferred president. If judicial independence matters, it should matter when judges reach decisions we dislike. If constitutional limits matter, they cannot disappear just because violating them would produce a desirable political outcome.

That is the crisis I see for myself and other law students today. We are entering a profession built on the idea that law places limits on political power at exactly the moment when those limits are increasingly being tested and politicized. How can it be that the lesson we take from law school is that principles matter only when they work in our favor?

The answer cannot be to choose which side gets to use the law as a weapon. It has to be to defend the idea that the law is not a weapon belonging to either side.

I do not want to finish law school thinking that the law is simply whatever my side says it is. While I am just a few weeks into the semester, I already understand that becoming a lawyer means more than learning to argue. It means deciding what principles are worth defending even when doing so may be impolitic. If future lawyers lose sight of that distinction, we may become very good at arguing our preferred political outcomes while forgetting what we were supposed to become lawyers for in the first place.