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For journalists, this may be the single most interesting and important time to be covering the courts.
As President Donald Trump tests the bounds of his executive power, virtually every significant policy decision he makes is heading to the courtroom.
It may give us all whiplash before it’s over, as one court upholds his latest executive order and another pauses or overturns some other edict.
Whether Trump is the jolt that America and its government needs, I leave that to our readers and constitutional scholars to decide.
But his moves are coming with such rapidity and the lawsuits are piling up in such volume that it’s hard to keep track of it all. But we’re trying.
In just the past week, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected Trump’s bid to freeze $2 billion in foreign aid, while lower federal courts have upheld his firing of the head of the Office of Special Counsel and blocked drastic funding cuts to medical research.
Our job here at The Indiana Lawyer is to provide you with as much information as we can as quickly as we can to help you make educated judgments—and to do it without embracing a political party or a point of view.
Every day, we try to make sure we catch every major court decision related to Trump on the Associated Press and The Washington Post wires, post the news on our website and include it in our daily e-newsletter. (You can subscribe at www.theindianalawyer.com/newsletters.)
We also examine those decisions, talk to our sources in the legal community and try to figure out what impact they are having on the practice of law and on our community at large.
Then we share our findings in broader stories that our staff of four produces. Those stories often appear first in our print edition before also appearing online.
Recently, you’ve seen stories from us regarding: the wave of questions law firms have received from businesses about how to respond to Trump’s edicts; the fears immigration attorneys have about being able to assist clients; and the disappointment of law students whose internships with the federal government were rescinded under Trump’s job freeze.
Our intent is to report the local impact of Trump’s policies on the legal community and the rule of law, both good and bad.
The president has made this difficult by unleashing a firehose of changes that is challenging for any newsroom to cover well and expansively, no matter how vast its resources.
He’s made it exceedingly difficult for the Associated Press to cover the Oval Office, denying reporters from the news agency access to that space. Trump has said he’ll keep AP out of the Oval until it stops referring to the Gulf of Mexico and uses his preferred Gulf of America.
Of course, AP will continue doing its job by using pool reports and other accepted reporting methods to cover whatever happens in the White House, while fighting Trump’s ban in court and arguing that it is a First Amendment violation.
We’ll continue to do our job too, with your help. We hope you’ll continue to let us know how the Trump administration’s policies are bringing change and tell us how you think we’re doing covering it all.•
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Greg Weaver is editor of The Indiana Lawyer..
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