Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez will be a featured speaker at a forum Wednesday at the University of Hawaiʻi William S. Richardson Law School to mark 100 days under the Trump administration and the more than 200 legal challenges filed against his actions. Hawaiʻi has joined in on a number of them.
The benchmark comes after The New York Times recently published two pieces; one essay surveyed 35 legal scholars about what has been characterized as presidential overreach. Has President Trump gone too far?
"Across the board, libertarian, conservative, moderate, liberal, they all basically were saying, 'This is shocking, we have never seen this, and certainly not from the top,'" said former UH Mānoa Law School Dean Avi Soifer. "This is a presidency that doesn't feel bound by anything, apparently, and certainly not by the rule of law."
A second NYT article covered a rare event recently in the nation's highest court: a standing ovation by the Supreme Court justices for a government lawyer who had given his final argument, his 160th. Edwin Kneedler was praised for his candor, integrity, and loyalty to the rule of law.
"It was someone, a deputy solicitor general, meaning he argues for the United States, who did his job consistently, no matter who the president was, no matter who was in Congress," Soifer said. "That notion that you do your job is unfortunately kind of disappearing these days."
Soifer said that it's important for people to protest actions they disagree with and make their voices heard.
"It's got to be a combination. This can't be done by any individual, or by just the press, or just the universities," he said.
This interview aired on The Conversation on April 29, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m.
