Legal Happenings
During Paris Bar Speech, D.C. Bar President Addresses Threats to Rule of Law
April 20, 2026
D.C. Bar President Sadina Montani addressed the Paris Bar on April 9, the latest occasion in a presidency marked by its many interactions with international legal organizations.
In one of the panel discussions during the three-day conference in Paris, France, Montani, along with International Bar Association Vice President Jörg Menzer, French journalist and legal scholar Anne-Cécile Robert, and French journalist and essayist Natacha Polony, spoke on the rule of law and contemporary threats to democracy.
Montani described the particular vantage point of the D.C. Bar as the largest unified bar in the United States comprising more than 123,000 attorneys. “We sit at the intersection of law, of government, and of the profession in a way that very few bars anywhere else in the world do,” Montani said. “What that means, in this moment, is that the threats [to democracy] we are discussing today are not a distant warning for us. They are present realities. They are issues that lawyers are navigating in their practices, in their careers, in their courtrooms right now.”
Montani explained the limitations of mandatory versus voluntary bars for the international audience, citing the U.S. Supreme Court case Keller v. State Bar of California limiting the use of compulsory dues to activities germane to regulating the profession or improving legal services. “So, in this moment, how does a mandatory bar speak credibly about rule of law issues without appearing to take partisan sides? This, actually, is not a rhetorical question. It is absolutely the central challenge of my Bar mandate,” Montani said.
In contrast, voluntary bars such as the American Bar Association (ABA) are not constrained in their ability to speak on topics that may have a political element. “This distinction explains why the American response has taken the shape that it has,” she said.
“We have been talking about whether the rule of law can survive without a strong and independent legal profession, and I think, quite simply, that the answer is no,” Montani said. “The rule of law requires of us three things that make an independent legal profession possible: access to courts, adversarial testing of government power, and professional independence that is insulated from executive control.”
Without the ability of attorneys to represent clients disfavored by the government, the ability to challenge government use of power, and a bar that is answerable to the courts rather than executive power, there could be no independent legal profession, and the courts could not perform their checking function as an independent branch of the government. “In the United States, right now, all three of these are under pressure,” Montani said.
“Funding for legal services has been cut, reducing access; law firms have been threatened with consequences for adversarial representation; and the executive branch is attempting, through a proposed rule … to insert the attorney general as the first reviewer of ethics complaints against [U.S. Department of Justice] lawyers. The legal profession’s authority to hold lawyers accountable, including government lawyers, is not a courtesy; it is actually a structural feature of the rule of law,” Montani said.
“The rule of law is not a self-executing principle,” she added. “It requires someone to invoke it, someone to argue it, someone to stand in a courtroom and say: This is the line, here are the rules, this is the law, this is how we have historically interpreted them.”
Montani provided a brief overview of the legal profession’s response to threats to rule of law, saying that the voluntary bars, led by the ABA, have been vocal and visible responders. She noted the significant coalition building that has taken place among voluntary and affinity bar associations, which she described as transcending geography, practice area, and constituency to result in unprecedented unity within the legal profession.
Of the D.C. Bar, Montani acknowledged that “not all of our 123,000 members agree on where the line falls between protecting the rule of law and taking partisan positions. Nor do we, as leadership, necessarily always agree as to what actions or risks we should take, as a bar, given our unique position and related restraints.”
“But, at base, I think [what] the American legal profession has largely arrived at, and I subscribe to, is this: Defending judicial independence, defending the right to counsel, and defending the rule of law are not partisan [actions]. [They are] professional,” Montani continued. “These are not political positions. These are the conditions that make the legal profession possible. These are the conditions that make the judicial branch meaningful, and if we cannot defend these conditions, what exactly are we as a profession? I’ll tell you what we are not — we are not passive observers.”
Montani closed by acknowledging the difficult and courageous decisions made by attorneys in the United States on a daily basis to take on cases and clients disfavored by the American government. She also said that international solidarity matters, and that issues relating to justice and rule of law extend beyond borders, thanking the Paris Bar for the opportunity to speak and be represented at the conference.
Montani’s full speech can be viewed here.
