A disregard for longstanding norms is testing the ethical foundations of the U.S. legal system, according to three legal experts who spoke April 27 at a Rockefeller Center/Dartmouth Dialogues event on Women, the Law, and a Better American Democracy.
The hour-long panel discussion at the Rockefeller Center was part of the ongoing Law and Democracy speaker series. About 120 people attended the forum while another 150 watched the livestream.
The conversation was moderated by professor Anna Mahoney, executive director of the Rockefeller Center, and Julie Kalish, a lecturer at the Rockefeller Center’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric.
“The fight of your lifetimes is to not normalize or metabolize that which is unethical,” said Dahlia Lithwick, a contributing analyst at MS NOW and senior editor at Slate Magazine who participated via video.
Lithwick, Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, and Mimi Rocah, a former district attorney for Westchester County, New York, moved quickly from personal connection to public consequence, drawing on careers that span federal prosecution, legal analysis, and journalism.
“We live in this era of disinformation and misinformation, and it’s so important to have thoughtful, reasonable voices that we can surround ourselves with,” said Vance, a distinguished professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama School of Law. “I don’t think any of us can underestimate the value of sustaining friendships at this point in time.”
The panelists described a wave of resignations by federal prosecutors who refused to carry out what they viewed as unethical directives from the Trump administration.
They cited an order to drop a corruption case against former New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for cooperation on immigration enforcement. That arrangement was later described in court as a quid pro quo, said Rocah, who had worked with prosecutors on that case.
One prosecutor was Celia Cohen, who was told that she could come back but only if she said the Adams case should never have been brought, said Rocah, an adjunct professor at Fordham School of Law.
“I mean, the cruelty,” she said. “She was marched out of the office by marshals as if she were a criminal.” Panelists also noted President Donald Trump’s pardoning of more than 1,500 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Gender-related concerns related to the law were also discussed.
“Many people have noticed that the decline of our democracy has been particularly gendered,” Mahoney said. “And so there’s a real fixation on masculinity, femininity, what do those things mean, and what they have to do with the United States, and as a society, how we expect people to live?”
Vance agreed, also noting the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe vs. Wade, which had established a right to abortion.
“I think women, in many ways, have led the fight for democracy, and the pushback is strongly gendered against them,” Vance said.
The panel explored how institutions hold under pressure, and what happens when they don’t. They expressed serious concerns about the lack of norms and ethics at the Justice Department under the Trump administration, especially for the rights of marginalized groups.
They also stressed the importance of staying close to communities who will support you when society looks bleak. All three have written recent books with a similar theme centered on the threat to democracy they see under the Trump administration.
For her book, Vance said she was motivated by desperation expressed by people who were shocked when Trump won a second term, and told her they were just going to step away and “let people bear the consequences.”
“The real guardrail in Trump 1.0 had been the public and public sentiment,” Vance said. “And I felt like going into this administration without public scrutiny could have been devastating for democracy. And it turns out, ultimately, you know, it’s us, right? It’s the voters. I mean, we’re the last stand for democracy.”
Lithwick encouraged the audience not to lose heart if they disagree with the Trump administration’s policies.
“You really, really have to be the democracy warrior that you want to see in the world,” Lithwick said. “It is not true that we can’t make change. It just feels as though we’re invisible right now.”
Rocah framed it more simply, echoing a principle she said guided her career as a prosecutor: “Integrity is hard to earn and easy to lose,” she said, adding: “Do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons.”
During the audience Q&A, a questioner asked the panel, “What happened to Todd Blanche,” the acting U.S. attorney general and Trump’s former defense attorney.
Rocah, who worked with Blanche as a federal prosecutor, described him as a hardworking, “salt-of-the-earth” person who everyone liked in the U.S. attorney’s office. But she takes issue with his current unbridled support for Trump while in a role that’s supposed to maintain separation from politics. She also criticized his treatment of survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I don’t have a great answer for how this happened,” Rocah said. “I mean, what he has become is an unrecognizable person to me. I mean, truly. I thought I knew this person. And I’m not alone in this.”
What advice, one student asked, would they give “to a young girl feeling discouraged by the fact that as a woman, it sometimes feels like we’re working twice as hard and only getting half as far?”
For Lithwick, the answer started with connection.
“I think the very first thing you should absolutely hear us saying is find a circle of people who feels the same way, and talk to them every single day, and know how incredibly powerful you are, how important your work is,” she said. Vance echoed that idea, urging students not to face those challenges alone.
“People wouldn’t try to make you feel small … unless they were afraid of how much power you possessed,” Vance said.
Rocah pointed to her own early career, when she was “so convinced that everybody knew more than I knew,” before realizing that confidence often masks uncertainty. The key, she said, is to move forward anyway.
“You can’t let it make you afraid to do stuff.”
The program was co-sponsored by the The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Ethics Institute at Dartmouth, the Department of Government, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences.
