On his LinkedIn page, J. B. Howard, Gilman alum and former Deputy Attorney General of Maryland, describes himself as “passionate about law, legal advocacy, and democracy.”
So, if true to that credo, such a man would reject as unholy Donald Trump’s efforts to use the power of his office to punish law firms that had a hand in the serious legal challenges, including criminal charges, he faced between presidencies.
Federal judges and Democrats in Congress question the legality of Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms, and four of them have asked the federal court in Washington to permanently strike his extortionate orders down. But, rather than fight, nine firms have already acquiesced to Trump’s demands, making a commitment of millions of dollars in pro bono work for mostly conservative causes.
One of those firms is Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft — targeted by Trump apparently because of its reluctance to defend him in his Manhattan fraud trial. Todd Blanche, an attorney at Cadwalader, said he had to leave the firm to represent Trump. Trump was convicted on 34 counts. Blanche is now deputy U.S. Attorney General.
According to Trump, Cadwalader agreed to at least $100 million in pro bono legal services for causes supported by his administration. The president reported this on Truth Social on April 15.
The same day, J.B. Howard submitted his resignation from his position at Cadwalader’s Washington office.
He declined to comment on that when I contacted him, but his resignation letter makes clear how the 61-year-old attorney feels about the firm’s decision — and what he believes about the practice of law. This is what Howard wrote to Pat Quinn, the firm’s managing partner:
“When I was admitted to the bar, I swore an oath not only to support the Constitution and the laws of the United States and Maryland, but also, critically, to ‘uphold the honor and dignity of the legal profession.’ In my view, society licenses us with the privilege of practicing law, and of earning a livelihood from the practice of law, in exchange for a solemn and nonnegotiable commitment to preserve and fight for our system of laws, without which lawyers have no purpose or reason to exist.
“The legal profession, the courts, and the rule of law are now under direct attack from a lawless administration determined to gut them. Can any serious person argue otherwise? The individual and institutional price we lawyers will have to pay, and the sacrifices we will have to make, to hold the line against this aggression may be enormous, but I view them as commitments we made when we became lawyers. I believe we either pay the price and fight or we forfeit our license and moral right to practice law.
“True, some have fiduciary duties to their law firms in the face of an arguably existential threat. But I believe we have a prior, and more fundamental, fiduciary duty to society to defend the rule of law, which itself faces an existential threat. . . . In my view, the deals now being cut are only emboldening that regime and further empowering it as, literally day by day, it gains more ground. I do not believe I can carry on at the firm knowing that I am now, in a sense, a party to one of these deals.”
The son of an attorney, J.B. Howard grew up in Roland Park and graduated in 1981 from Gilman School, where he had been a standout goaltender, making the Sun’s All-Metro lacrosse team.
He studied for an undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina, where he was a member of the 1982 NCAA Division I champion men’s lacrosse team. He was recognized as an Atlantic Coast Conference scholar-athlete, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UNC in 1985.
Howard studied law at the University of Virginia and edited the Virginia Law Review. He clerked, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, for the late Judge James Dickson Phillips, Jr.
Howard had three separate stints in the Maryland Attorney General’s office over a 30-year period.
He was an assistant AG early in his career, from 1993 to 1998, serving under Joe Curran. After seven years at Venable, Howard returned to public service as Deputy AG for Doug Gansler, from 2007 to 2015. Howard took a position with Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr before then-Attorney General Brian Frosh made him a special assistant for issues involving clean energy and climate change. He worked in the AG’s office for five more years before taking a position as counsel in global litigation at Cadwalader in 2023.
Howard’s combined 18-plus years in the Maryland AG’s office gave him experience in several areas of law — public-private partnerships, federal consent decrees, regulatory issues, civil rights actions and energy regulation.
“First of all, he’s just an all-around great lawyer,” Frosh said. “He’s very smart. He does a very thorough job, and he’s an extremely nice person. It was a delight to have him in the office.”
Howard’s work in private practice was varied and complex, and sometimes involved settling disputes and investigating allegations of misconduct. In fact, judging from his campaign ribbons, Howard appears to be the kind of attorney others call upon to clean up a mess.
He represented a real estate investment trust in a shareholder dispute, a biotech company in an internal financial investigation, and the outside directors of a Maryland savings and loan that collapsed in the early 1990s. Howard handled two investigations of suspected misconduct by partners in a national law firm.
Also, while Deputy AG, Howard worked with former Attorney General Steve Sachs in an investigation of a Maryland State Police spy operation that involved the surveillance of activists and protestors, some of them wrongly labeled terrorists.
Throughout his career, Howard had a reputation for writing good legal briefs; he won a national award for it, taught a class in it at the University of Baltimore. And when the time came to write one, he composed an exceptionally good, deeply principled letter of resignation — a passionate defense of a profession under attack by the felon in the White House.
Dan–Saturday night, my wife and I are having dinner with another couple whose son is a partner at Kirkpatrick & Ellis, one of the firms that caved to Trump. Should I ask them how much pain their son suffered when, on becoming a partner, he had his spine surgically removed.
Thank you Dan Rodricks for these pieces of an extremely troubling puzzle. My fear is that by the time the mid-term elections come around, we may have already seen the death of OUR democracy.
Interestingly, Mr. Howard’s old boss and former AG of Maryland, Doug Gansler, looks like he’s ok staying at Cadwalader.
Re: “Fiduciary duty” – There’s a somewhat more fundamental duty. One can be executed for violating certain duties of citizenship. There’s no violation of a solely fiduciary duty that is a capital crime.
US lawyers are citizens first, officers of the court second, and corporate fiduciaries third. But in addition, the corporation itself is also a fiduciary, which allows it to make decisions on behalf of a client and thus shield itself from liability for the decision made. Bribery is a crime. No amount of legal mumbo-jumbo changes that. Had the law firm been acting on behalf of, and on the direction of, a client, the bribery could be considered mere quid pro quo and legally acceptable. But they acted on behalf of themselves, and have no such fiduciary shield here.
IANAL, but this should be self-evident.