Democracy Forward President & CEO Skye Perryman Delivers Constitution Day Keynote Address at the University of Louisville, hosted by the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law
Washington, D.C. – Ahead of Constitution Day, Democracy Forward President & CEO Skye Perryman delivered a keynote address on September 10, “Reflections on the People’s Lawyer in an Era of ‘Catch Me If You Can Justice,’” at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, at an event hosted by the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. The U.S. Congress has designated September 17 as Constitution Day, and it has been observed annually since 1952.
In her remarks, Perryman called for people to recognize the power they have to exercise their rights, protect their communities, and hold the government accountable by initiating litigation when their rights are violated. She reflected on the career of Justice Louis Brandeis, before he became a U.S. Supreme Court justice, when he was known as the “People’s Lawyer” for his early example of public interest lawyering in a time of great peril and what lawyers can take from his example today.
“It’s important that we recognize that the arc of the country is not one that has bent on its own. We have to remember who we are, and the fights that have been before us and the long odds that people had in earlier times,” said Perryman in her remarks. “The only way out is through, and we have to get through it together. We have to get through it with our Constitution in mind, but more importantly, with the people in mind. We have to defy the notion that people lack power, and we have to stare down the threats to our freedom, to our Constitution as a living document, and to our democracy.”
Democracy Forward is a national, non-partisan, non-profit legal organization that advances democracy and social progress through litigation, policy, public education, and regulatory engagement. With more than 100 legal actions and 150 investigations since January 2025, Democracy Forward has quickly become a frontline defense against abuses of power at every level of government, and has won significant nationwide court orders, protecting people from the Trump-Vance administration’s harmful actions, winning before a diverse mix of judges appointed by presidents from all parties, on behalf of unions, nonprofit organizations, veterans groups, educators, houses of worship, small businesses, and more. It also has launched significant state and local efforts to protect people’s rights and strengthen civil society.
Reflecting on how Justice Brandeis’ legacy as the “People’s Lawyer” applies to this time, Perryman shared with the audience: “We know that autocratic actors – their major tool is not voter suppression, or redistricting, or gerrymandering – their major tool is trying to convince people that they have no power. And so we have to remember, as Brandeis did in that time, when the titans of industry would have you believe that some pro bono lawyer and a few clients weren’t going to be able to make inroads, weren’t going to be able to pursue justice, we have to believe and know that we have power, and we’re going to have to find ways to use it in courts and in communities.”
Perryman’s address encouraged all lawyers to fight for people, democracy, and the rule of law, amidst attacks on the profession. She discussed the need for lawyers to protect the clients they represent.
She also discussed the importance and power that all people have, noting that the work to protect democracy is at our own front door and in communities across the country. Brandeis famously remarked that “the only title in our democracy superior to that of president is the title of citizen.” Perryman encouraged the audience, as they reflected on Constitution Day, to use the power they have in their community and across the nation to resist autocracy, advance democracy, and use the crisis the United States is in as a catalyst for lasting change.
Perryman’s remarks can be viewed here, and her remarks follow:
Constitution Day this year approaches at an incredibly trying time. These things are beyond politics at this point. The president of the United States has sent troops into Los Angeles, into Washington, DC, and has threatened to do so in Chicago and New Orleans. Masked individuals are detaining people. They’re stopping them in houses of worship and in their communities. The Supreme Court effectively this week, on Monday, ruled that in Los Angeles you can be stopped and detained because of your race and ethnicity, the language you speak, and the characteristics you have like your job.
The United States Supreme Court is issuing a number of orders that are unexplained — not based on a full record, based on an emergency docket that is being misused as a shadow docket. And if that wasn’t enough – and I know we have Bar Association members here – the president is threatening lawyers, law students, judges, the American Bar Association, institutions of higher education, the press, and the list goes on and on.
So, while it’s customary on September 17th to celebrate and commemorate the signing of the Constitution, many people that are working on behalf of communities across the country are just asking, “Where is the Constitution? Is it here? Where is justice? What is this moment?” And what do we do in a time where justice, in the words of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her oral argument questioning in the birthright citizenship case, seems to be no longer a journey on a moral arc, but a game of “catch me if you can” — where we and the lawyers that I work with, many of the lawyers that you will work with, are literally having to play a game of daily whack-a-mole in order to just be able to get people and communities in this country to be able to access the courts, let alone to be able to win court orders and then to be able to ensure compliance with those court orders.
So those are some lofty questions that are facing all of us in our profession, for those of you in the law or in any profession, as we face Constitution Day this year. I think, as I’ve reflected on it, that those questions can really be answered by people in this room and by the Brandeis Law School and the work that you’re doing. They can be found in the story of the Constitution itself, and the American people’s true struggle for justice, and in the way in which Justice Louis Brandeis’ life encapsulates pieces of that struggle, his life not as a justice, but as the People’s Lawyer, where he spent the majority of his career lawyering and litigating for people against long odds. And in a really trying time, if we reflect on it.
The Constitution itself was born out of a crisis a few years after revolutionaries threw off the reins of monarchy. The American experiment was not going so well. The words in the Declaration of Independence… that all people should be created equal… they rang hollow. The institution of slavery continued to exist. Women did not have their full rights. Native Americans continued to be deprived of their land. Families separated. People did mental gymnastics and moral gymnastics to try to somehow match the words of that Declaration of Independence with what was happening in America – and that’s on the moral issues.
On the kitchen table issues, this country wasn’t really delivering either. Farmers faced high debts they were unable to pay after the Revolutionary War – you remember the story. The states were frustrated, they had debt too. They were raising taxes and implementing policies that were hurting farmers. And so, a former member of the Continental Army, Daniel Shays, organized a violent insurrection to take down the courts in Massachusetts, to stop local government. And that organized armed insurrection ended up with an attack on an armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. This action wasn’t stopped by the federal government, because there was such a weak federal government.
And it wasn’t just Shays’ Rebellion that precipitated the concerns at the time – the questions of the early Republic: “What are we doing here? Is this experiment really working?” The United States was hanging by a thread. There’s an apocryphal story of diplomats across the world asking United States ambassadors, “Do you represent one country or do you represent 13?” Those questions, of course, led to the convention that was designed to revise the Articles of Confederation, where the Constitution itself was born.
Despite being such a young country, the United States Constitution is the world’s longest-surviving charter of government. The opening lines: “We the People” affirm that the purpose of the United States government is to serve the people. And yet as the late Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan shared in her impeachment inquiry in the Nixon and Watergate trials, when the Constitution was signed and ratified, she was not included in “We the People.” Many of us in this room weren’t.
The nation did have a Constitution, but where were the people, and where was justice?
The Constitution recognized the judicial power of the United States in the Supreme Court and then, of course, in courts that Congress could create. And so it wasn’t so long until the Supreme Court started deciding cases. Marbury v. Madison, you’ll remember, would be the first case in which the court would strike down a law invoking the Constitution. A few years later, McCulloch v. Maryland, the Court recognized that Congress had the power to create a national bank under the Constitution. A National Bank isn’t spelled out in the Constitution, but Justice Marshall, in writing in that case, recognized that the Constitution isn’t a strict legal code, it is something, in his words, that is thought to endure for ages to come “and to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” He said, “We must never forget it’s a constitution that we are expounding.”
The Court did appear to quickly forget that. While we’re used to a Supreme Court that routinely strikes things down based on the Constitution, it didn’t happen often in the early days of the Court.
After Marbury v Madison, Dred Scott is the next decision where, in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court used the Constitution to strike down acts of Congress. The Court found that, under our Constitution, Mr. Scott, who was an enslaved man that sued for his freedom, could not bring that case. That case started about 300 miles from here in the Circuit Court in St. Louis, Missouri, and it has been seen as still one of the most significant decisions in the history of any constitution. Justice Taney found that under our Constitution, Mr. Scott wasn’t able to sue. You might wonder, “Where were Justice Marshall’s words that it is important to consider “human crises” in our interpretation of the Constitution?” The dissenting justice in that case asked, “If the state could do this on a matter of human freedom, what else could it do?”
We had a Constitution at that time. But where was the justice?
The failure of the Supreme Court and our Constitution in the Dred Scott decision fueled tensions that would be seen as a major precipitating event of the Civil War.
And it is there that our journey with Louis Brandeis begins.
Brandeis was two years old when the Dred Scott decision was decided by the court. He was born here in Louisville to two Jewish immigrants who had fled Europe for a better life. He was a citizen by virtue of his birthright here, in keeping with English common law. Birthright citizenship was the law of the land for everyone except enslaved persons at the time. Brandeis’ parents were naturalized citizens.
Brandeis would remember and later recount his mother feeding union troops in his yard here in Louisville as a child. And while many people know of his successful career, graduating at the top of his class at Harvard Law and establishing a successful practice in Boston, many people don’t realize that he actually started his legal career in St. Louis, Missouri.
He moved from Harvard to Missouri to start his career. He was sworn into the bar in the same courthouse where Dred Scott sued to get his citizenship and his freedom. He handled ordinary cases in St. Louis for about seven months until moving back to Boston to pursue a clerkship and then a successful legal practice.
While he was in St. Louis for that short amount of time, Brandeis’ law office was actually positioned near where historians have told us there were hundreds of African-American and Black Americans walking the streets in search of a new life as part of the Great Migration. And while he never really wrote about that at the time, he would later call St. Louis, “the valley of democracy” and encourage people to go back there. You know the rest of the story. After a successful career in Boston representing corporate and powerful clients, he moved into public interest lawyering. And I think it’s important to understand that he moved into public interest lawyering at a time when that did not exist.
When we think about public interest lawyering today, we often think about lawyers in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, the Thurgood Marshalls, Ruth Bader Ginsburgs, Charles Hamilton Houstons of the world who were able to win court orders, and challenged and changed the scope of the rights of people. But at the time when Brandeis refocused his powerful corporate law practice in the late 1800s, that is not the view of the law that existed.
The ACLU had not been formed, nor the NAACP, nor the Legal Defense Fund, and Brandeis represented causes and people pro bono at a time when that was considered eccentric and not really done. He refocused his corporate law practice when he saw that the legal profession was becoming, in his words, “mercenary-like.” And he wondered, as industry changed, and as the powerful got more powerful and the wealthy got more wealthy, who was going to be there to represent the people.
And while after the Civil War, the Constitution came to recognize equal protection, extending birthright citizenship to all, the abolition of slavery, the right to vote, Brandeis’ generation of lawyers did not have a Supreme Court that was particularly progressive or embracing of “We, the People.” In cases like Bradwell v. Illinois in the late 1800s, the Court found, after the 14th amendment’s adoption and ratification, that that amendment still allowed states to prohibit women from practicing law. A justice of the Supreme Court… writing into court documents… that women could not practice law because they were “ordained by their creator” to be a “wife and mother[s].” That was the type of Supreme Court at the time that Brandeis was lawyering.
You all know that there was this case of Lochner v. New York, where the Supreme Court invoked the Constitution to strike down laws to protect bakers from harsh working conditions.
There was a Constitution, but where was the justice in that time?
And you could say the same thing for the anti-monopoly laws that were being passed at the time and struck down by the Court.
So, when we talk about Brandeis taking on the powerful on behalf of the people, we’re not talking about a lawyer that was treading a worn path or that had a particularly great chance of success. He was not a lawyer working with a particularly progressive Supreme Court… to say the least.
But for Brandeis, as a lawyer and as the “People’s Lawyer,” that did not concern him. He was not concerned with legal abstractions, he was not intimidated by them or where the courts might find them. He was grounded in the experiences of people and what he could do in the moment with the tool that he had with the law. He found a way or made one in so many ways in his legal advocacy. He wasn’t just focused on representing people – that’s what we think of when we think of him as the People’s lawyer – but he was focused on grounding his representation of people in the real experiences of people.
Brandeis famously was counsel in Muller v. Oregon, where the Supreme Court, two years after striking down bakers’ workers’ laws in Lochner, was able to distinguish that case and uphold a workers’ rights law. He did that through listening to his clients: the women who had retained him convinced him that if he could just go gather the experiences, the sociology, the political science, and the experience of real people, he could develop a brief that might be able to cut through the legal abstractions of a Court that sought to deny the experiences of people.
When he was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was subject to the first public confirmation hearing and it was a brutal one. A combination of racism and antisemitism, as well as his taking on, unabashedly, powerful corporate interests, meant that he was not a favorite to be appointed to the Supreme Court at the age of 60. He ultimately ended up being confirmed, and you’ve heard about the dissents that he issued. He dissented, dissented, dissented – and eventually changed the course of legal history.
But we’re not here to talk about him as a justice on the Supreme Court, we’re here to talk about him as the “People’s Lawyer,” what we can learn about Justice Brandeis’ form of lawyering in this time of, what Justice Jackson calls “catch me if you can justice.”
I will tell you a story about when we talk about what “catch me if you can justice” is, at this moment, based on the experiences of our clients at Democracy Forward, and the clients that we have the privilege of representing alongside organizations like the ACLU.
In March, the president, in the dark of night, signed a proclamation to invoke wartime powers to be able to remove people from this country without any process at all. They were shuffling people onto planes in order to be able to remove them from the jurisdiction of the United States, so they claimed, before the courts could act. They were doing it intentionally, and they miscalculated – because those people who were being shuffled onto planes had lawyers. And our teams at Democracy Forward and the ACLU went to court at 1am, filing a lawsuit, winning a court order the next day to pause the removal of these people until the court could consider what was happening and consider if due process had been served — winning a court order that said, “turn the planes around” on a Saturday afternoon. But the “catch me if you can” form of justice that is common right now at the Department of Justice and in some courts in this country didn’t care about that court order. The administration didn’t turn the planes around, and our clients were in an El Salvadoran gulag prison for months in violation of a court order.
So when we talk about being in a time of “catch me if you can justice,” it’s not just a cute phrase. It’s not just something that’s relevant to the birthright citizenship case and the question about the scope of injunctions. It’s about an entire system that lawyers in this country are having to get in and fight against. We did, and we have.
We haven’t fully caught justice in that case, but just this week, if you’ve seen the news, we were able to secure the release of one of the major agreements between the United States and El Salvador, forcing the administration’s hands as a result of another representation that the administration made that was filed in open court. The administration engaged in a prison swap, and many of our clients are now not in El Salvador, all of this because people had lawyers and could get into court.
And so what can we learn from Justice Brandeis’ brand of lawyering in this time of “catch me if you can justice?” In a time where we do have a Constitution but where many of us, and certainly all of our clients, are asking, “Where is the justice?”
First, we must be clear-eyed about where we are as a nation and as a people. Justice Brandeis as a lawyer was very clear-eyed about where the country was. It was not progressing. The rich were getting wealthier. There were no constraints, of any kind, on industry. He understood the Supreme Court that he would ultimately face, and he understood the barriers along the way.
And so we need to be clear about where we are as a country right now. We are in the midst of a rapidly accelerating autocratic system. People in this nation are living in fear and terror every day – to take their children to school, to worship in places of worship. It is happening to American citizens. It is happening to people who legally entered the country. It is happening in communities across the country. And if it hasn’t happened in yours, it will be there soon.
When we are willing to look that reality in the face, acknowledge it and not blink, to say we are in a new paradigm right now, we are in a rapidly accelerating autocratic situation, we can be clear-eyed about what we need to do next. There’s no time to give any ground when threats to our freedom are here. There’s no flexibility to give any ground. When Justice Brandeis was a corporate lawyer, he was one of the first lawyers that would go visit his client’s businesses. He believed, as we teach lawyers, that you have to know your client’s business in order to be the best lawyer. And when he was the People’s Lawyer, he got to know his clients well.
And so as hard as it is for us to, at the end of an exhausting day, to listen to that news report, to talk to that community member, to hear something uncomfortable, we have to do that in this moment to understand where we are, and to not make excuses for where we are, so that we can find the path forward. Brandeis understood that through pushing in the courts, movements can be built and really that the power of people is required.
Second, we need to be clear-eyed about our Constitution, our courts, and our institutions. Aside from a short-lived few decades in the latter part of the 20th century and a smattering of some victories in the 21st century, the United States Supreme Court has more often than not, not been a deliverer of justice for all. We need to see that and know that and contend with that.
The victories that we have had, they have been hard fought. They haven’t been “handed down” from the Court at all, they have been hard fought. We need to understand and remember that history. Brandeis understood that the fight for democracy was not actually in the halls of government, not actually in the robes of the justices, but was in the lives of people – was at our front doorstep. He called St. Louis – not Washington, DC – “a valley of democracy,” and when he mentored Roger Baldwin, who would go on to found the ACLU, he suggested that Baldwin start his career in St. Louis, not in New York, not in Boston, not in other places that might be considered more elite. He understood that communities were the laboratories of democracy. There is nowhere that that is more true than here in Kentucky and here in Louisville.
We don’t have to march up the steps of the Supreme Court every day or show up at the White House to fight for our democracy. The fight for our democracy is here. And Justice Brandeis knew that and recognized that, and we can learn that from his model of lawyering.
Third, we must meet the challenges that our profession, and here I’m talking about the legal profession, face in this moment. Justice Brandeis would write about the challenges that the legal profession in his moment was facing. He believed it was becoming a mercenary force, where lawyers would do and say whatever they were paid to do and say. And he understood that the losers in that would be the people, democracy, and our Constitution.
We only wish lawyers were mercenary forces today. Now we have law firms that are actually going out of their way to capitulate and to facilitate the unlawful and unconstitutional operation of the executive branch of the United States of America. So we have to confront that head-on. Courage is the new currency.
What we are seeing in the legal profession is that while the powerful institutions are pulling back, the people are stepping forward. We have not been able to answer the phone fast enough for the law students, the solo practitioners, the mid-size firms, firms that might not have even had a litigation focus that are reaching out saying, “How can we be part of this fight for our Constitution and our democracy?”
We also need to support our bar associations. The American Bar Association has stood up for the rule of law. They’re one of our clients. We have gone to court and won a court order against the administration’s retaliation against our professional association. Simply saying that lawyers have to follow their professional obligations and defend the rule of law landed the ABA on the Department of Justice’s bad list. The Department of Justice said that government attorneys could not do continuing legal education in their offices or on government computers if the education was offered by the American Bar Association. They also sought to cancel federal grants that train attorneys to assist survivors of sexual assault. We’ve sued and challenged and secured the ABA’s federal funding because what the administration did was unlawful retaliation under our Constitution. That is what our profession is facing, and that’s just the ABA, let alone the local and state bar associations that are really going to have to stand strong in this moment. We have to support them – go look them up, get involved, attend a meeting, pay an extra due. We have to do that in this time.
Fourth, we also have to push ourselves to be excellent. Excellence is not perfection. Justice Brandeis knew that, but he was very careful and a shrewd advocate and worked incredibly hard to build creative cases, to push, to ask hard questions.
Our team at Democracy Forward filed and won a court order blocking the decimation of the Department of Education. We had that order then upheld by an appellate court, and then the Supreme Court, on the shadow docket, without any explanation whatsoever, removed the court order. No one said that what the president is doing is lawful, but now there are many people who have dedicated their careers as our career civil servants that are being fired from their jobs because of the president’s attempt to decimate the Department of Education, so we’re continuing to vigorously litigate that case.
But we built another case, because at the same time that the president was seeking to decimate the Department of Education, he was also impounding more than $6 billion in funds, including funds that go to red and rural areas all across the country, that would’ve wrecked public school districts this school year. So we filed a case to challenge that unlawful withholding of funds. That case, and the movement of people together, speaking out, listening to the people, forced the administration to release those funds. That is a win that the Supreme Court cannot take away. And it happened through pushing in the courts and through people raising their voices at the same time. It happened even while we’re still having to fight vigorously in many other cases.
So, we have to keep going, and keep pushing, and we have to push ourselves to be excellent, to think about the different ways that we can argue a case and build a case and force the American people and the Court to contend with the experiences of real people. That is what Brandeis did as a lawyer.
We also must never give up our title. One of my favorite quotes from Brandeis early in his career, he wasn’t a Supreme Court justice when he said this, was that “the only title in our democracy superior to that of president is the title of citizen.” You all have heard that. We believe it is true.
Thanks to this Supreme Court, I don’t think we’ve ever had a president that is more powerful than the president is now, but we know that it is the power of the people that is supreme. And one of the powers that people have is the ability to initiate litigation against their government when their rights are violated. And so we have to keep doing that every day to win the court orders, but also to tell and elevate the stories of people. And that has to be accompanied by the voices of people marching, protesting, organizing, speaking out.
We know it does matter. We know that autocratic actors – their major tool is not voter suppression, or redistricting, or gerrymandering – their major tool is trying to convince people that they have no power. And so we have to remember, as Brandeis did in that time, when the titans of industry would have you believe that some pro bono lawyer and a few clients wasn’t going to be able to make inroads, wasn’t going to be able to pursue justice, we have to believe and know that we have power, and we’re going to have to find ways to use it in courts and in communities.
As we commemorate Constitution Day next week, it’s important that we recognize that the arc of the country is not one that has bent on its own. We have to remember who we are and the fights that have been before us and the long odds that people had in earlier times. We are here. And, the only way out is through, and we have to get through it together. We have to get through it with our Constitution in mind, but more importantly, with the people in mind. We have to defy the notion that people lack power, and we have to stare down, and I do mean stare down, the threats to our freedom, to our Constitution as a living document, and to our democracy.
We do have a Constitution, but where is the justice? I do believe that it’s here at this university with the lawyers, with the law students, with so many people working in education to educate the next generation of people who are going to find a way here in Kentucky. They’re going to find a way or make a way to represent the people and to do the work of the people, and that this crisis can be a catalyst for real change, and we’ll just say, “catch me if you can.”
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