Richard P. Swanson — Presidential Induction Speech May 29, 2025

Induction Speech of Richard P. Swanson
President, New York County Lawyers Association
NYCLA Home of Law
Presented May 29, 2025

Thank you, Stewart, or should I say Judge Aaron, for those kind and generous remarks.  They weren’t all true, but they were kind and generous.

As Stewart said, he’s been a friend for 40 years, and a law partner for 10 of those.  We’re proud to see him on the bench.

We are also pleased to see that Chief Justice Roberts has appointed Judge Aaron to a nationwide federal judicial task force dealing with judicial security, which is unfortunately of utmost importance in these times.  The Chief Justice has recognized Stewart’s abilities, which we have all seen at NYCLA over many, many years now.

I have so many people here tonight to thank.  The first is Adrienne, who has done a spectacular job as president for the past two years, and for the six years before that as treasurer, vice-president and president-elect.  During her tenure as president, we accomplished so much:

• We defended the judiciary against unwarranted attacks arising out of cases against our current President (that is, of the United States, not NYCLA).

• We successfully litigated a case against the State of New York, dramatically increasing the rate of pay for counsel for indigent defendants in criminal cases who hadn’t received a raise in 20 years, helping fulfill the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright, which the Supreme Court decided 60 years ago, a case litigated, by the way, at Stewart’s and my law firm, which is well represented here tonight. We thank Arnold & Porter for its continued loyal support of this organization.

• I must say I’m proud of Stewart’s and my former firm for its strong support of the Rule of Law, at a time when many firms are afraid to defend its importance to our democracy.  Arnold & Porter was one of the very few AmLaw 100 firms willing to sign onto the Munger Tolles law firm amicus brief prepared by former Solicitor General Don Verilli in the law firm Executive Order cases.  They have also sued the Administration more times than any other single law firm, including in the USAID shutdown case, where DOGE essentially abolished the agency even though Congress had created and authorized it and every year appropriated funds for it.  The ability to retain independent counsel to challenge our Government’s actions is essential to the Rule of Law as it is a fundamental part of our adversarial system of justice.

• Our participation in the indigent criminal defense case helped lead to the creation of a bar association working group, consisting of ourselves, City Bar and the other downstate bars as to how better administer indigent legal defense in New York, including professional certifications, qualifications, bill and other approvals and other seemingly mundane but important administrative matters involving the Uniform Court System, Office of Court Administration, the Mayor’s Office for Criminal Justice and other public bodies. Ron Minkoff has been leading the charge for NYCLA, for which I want to thank him, as well as Debevoise & Plimpton for providing necessary legal support.

• We successfully litigated another case against the State, challenging the State’s taking of IOLA funds, or Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts, which are also supposed to be for indigent legal services, to ensure that seizure would never happen again. For this I also have to thank Hank Greenberg, our pro bono counsel in the case, whose team at Greenberg Traurig was amazing.  Hank now sits on our board and was just elected as our vice president, putting him on the leadership track to become president-elect and then president.

I could go on and on about Adrienne’s accomplishments, but I’ll mention just two others:

• After the Students for Fair Admissions case, she organized a working group of local tri-state area bar associations, county, affinity and specialty, to come together to support diversity in the judiciary, which we believe is critical to maintaining public confidence in it.

  • That collaboration paid off a second time when we went back to the same well after the election, to ask those same bar groups to support efforts to ensure due process in deportations, by soliciting bar association members to volunteer to provide pro bono representation, and to train them. Here, I also have to thank our newly elected president-elect, Ron Minkoff, who played a key role in organizing the resulting CLE.

• I also have to thank Adrienne and Ron for organizing our May 1 Law Day Rally in Foley Square, in support of the Rule of Law. That was an outstanding event, in which 2000 lawyers came together to say we oppose the seeming start of what may become a slide into Presidential autocracy.  I want to thank Jessica Breuer for her outstanding organizational efforts, including obtaining the required permits without which the Rally could not have occurred, and our new General Counsel, Sharon Sash, who, in her very first week on the job, had to put together the necessary contracts.

• I’d also be remiss if I didn’t thank all of NYCLA’s outstanding staff, led by our indefatigable Executive Director, Sophia Gianacoplos, and her key direct reports, Toni Valenti, our director of marketing and communications, and Bari Chase, our CLE director. And I have to acknowledge Christina Andujar, whose dedicated and loyal service keeps all the trains running on time.

• So what are my plans for the coming year?

These are strange and challenging times for the Rule of Law.  We have to continue to support it.

Adrienne could not have anticipated when she became president that these challenges would occur, and we of course had to pivot.

Thousands of dedicated federal employees have been fired, including independent career investigators and prosecutors who participated in the investigation and prosecution of violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021.  Deportations have occurred in a manner that the Supreme Court has now said were without required due process.

Threats, in the form of Executive Orders, have also been made against law firms who take and have taken on clients and positions that the Administration disapproves, jeopardizing the independence of outside counsel, which is essential to our adversarial system of justice.  As one recently retired judge said, “Don’t tell me who the hell I can and can’t represent.”

In the case of the judiciary, there have been threats of impeachment, including in some instances the introduction of actual articles of impeachment.  As Chief Justice Roberts noted, disagreement with a judicial decision, and even criticism of a decision and its reasoning, is permissible, but the usual remedy for such disagreement and criticism is an appeal, not impeachment.

Even more frightening, there have been actual threats of physical violence against judges which is completely unacceptable.  At NYCLA we were strong supporters of the Judicial Security and Privacy Act, enacted when Judge Esther Salas’s son Daniel Anderl was killed at their home by a disappointed litigant.  Now there are reports of pizzas being sent to various judges’ homes, in the name of Daniel Anderl, as if to say “we know where you live and we want you to live in fear, as we both know what happened to him.”  And the threats to disregard judicial decisions strikes at the very foundations of our system of judicial review that are at the heart of our country’s dedication to the rule of law.  When Marbury v. Madison can be said to be up for grabs after more than 200 years, then everything has to be considered to be up for grabs.

We have come out against all of those things and during my presidency we will continue to do so. I want to commend Arthur Aufses for his leadership of our Rule of Law Task Force, which has helped immeasurably in keeping up to date on these developments, and there will continue to be work to be done.

What have we been doing at NYCLA to respond to these ongoing threats?  First, we’ve been issuing statements, and lots of them.  We were the very first bar association to speak out.  We also pushed the ABA to become more active in this space, which we are pleased to see they are doing.  The ABA is collecting bar association statements on its website, and NYCLA has more than any other bar association.

We have also been defending the judiciary whenever necessary, because we know that the judiciary is ethically prohibited from defending itself except through the decisions that judges make and the opinions that they write.  For example, when one of the judges in the Southern District of New York, Judge Engelmeyer, was threatened with articles of impeachment for a decision he rendered against DOGE, we issued a statement defending him against unwarranted attack.  We do the same for our colleagues on the state court bench.  Defending the judiciary is part of our core function at NYCLA, as it should be for any bar association.

Our Rally was also intended to demonstrate our support for the Rule of Law, in a very public way.  We’ve also joined in amicus briefs in the various law firm cases, challenging the Administration’s Executive Orders, each of which to this point has resulted in the issuance of a TRO, and three of which, Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and Wilmer, have already resulted in summary judgments.  I expect we will have a 4-0 series sweep shortly.  I fully intend to continue these and other efforts to voice our ongoing concerns.

Because we understand the frustration that many individual lawyers have with the reluctance of large law firms to speak out in defense of the Rule of Law, we hope lawyers will join us, and our bar association colleagues, in this effort.  We are unafraid to express our views.  That’s what bar associations, including ours, should be doing.  The best way to express solidarity with our views is to join a bar association, to help the associations’ support for the rule of law.  If your firm fears speaking out, and you disagree with that decision, or are even just mildly concerned about it, join a bar association to make your own voice heard.  We hope that the bar association that you join will be ours, but any organized bar group that is willing to speak out will do.  In fact, we’ve reached out widely, via email and social media, to encourage lawyers to join us to support our efforts.

A second initiative that I am planning for my presidential year is to focus on the challenges faced by what I like to call the “high volume” courts, such as Civil, Criminal, Small Claims, Family and Housing.  These courts are where John and Jane Q. Public are most likely to encounter the justice system.  We honored the Commercial Division at our March gala, and they do a wonderful job, and I want to thank Bob Haig for his consistent efforts to make our gala one of the greatest highlights of every bar year.  The work volume of the Commercial Division is driven less by the number of cases, however, and more by the complexity of the cases, and the sheer number of substantive motions in each case.  The “high volume” courts, by contrast, are driven more just by the sheer number of cases.

In the Family Court, for example, the impact of crushing caseloads has been that it is common for “trials” to be conducted a half an hour or an hour at a time with lengthy adjournments in between.  People have to be prepared to take an entire day off from work each time there is a trial “day” scheduled, sacrificing income, and by the time the matter is concluded, the child may be in a different life and developmental phase altogether.

In the Housing Court, the statutory requirements are for the cases to proceed rapidly.  Again, the impact of crushing caseloads means that this rarely occurs.  The statutory timing requirements aren’t just honored in the breach rather than the observance.  They are just disregarded altogether.

Under the leadership of Adrienne and Michael Miller, Steve Smollens, co-chair of our Civil Court Practice Section, has organized a working group to assess the physical conditions of the courthouses in which these courts, among others, have to operate.  I’ve taken steps to enhance and grow that group to assess other operational problems impacting the high volume courts as well.

Another related initiative we are going to try to undertake is to focus on the problems of providing necessary legal services to the indigent.  New York has promised to have civil Gideon for the indigent, but those promises have fallen short.  State and City funding has not been at the level required, and indeed in the last two budget cycles monies were diverted to the State’s general fund for other purposes.  In fairness this is a nationwide problem.  In fact, notwithstanding all the attention paid to pro bono services in the law firm cases, the number of hours devoted to pro bono in large law firms has been on the decline.  Our profession hasn’t met its obligations in that regard. We’re really proud of our diverse pro bono programs here at NYCLA, which are detailed in our Annual Report, and which serve literally thousands of clients each year but if you view the needs locally and nationally it is only a drop in the bucket. 

I’ve asked Adrienne as one of her tasks as our Immediate Past President to serve as a co-chair of our Justice Center, alongside Seymour James and Steve Lessard, to begin to address this issue, and she has graciously agreed.   

We’re also in the early stages of a major strategic planning review.  The officers and the board have retained Bennett-Midland, a respected non-profit consulting firm, to help us evaluate our operations and service offerings, towards the goal of increasing our membership.  NYCLA, like most membership organizations, and all bar associations, has suffered from a decline in membership over a number of years now.  You can see that in our financial statements.  That has led us to ask Bennett-Midland to help us review our overall strategic plan, to try to help match our service offerings to what our members and prospective members actually want.

Of course, there will be other projects to work on as well.  We didn’t anticipate the challenges to the rule of law that we now face a mere six months ago.  Circumstances will continue to change, and we will have to respond to them.  And of course, we welcome suggestions from our members as to what projects and services they want to see us undertake.

I want to close by thanking Michael McNamara and all the members of the Nominating Committee, for showing the confidence in me to nominate me for this role.  My journey with NYCLA began when I joined in 1981 at the suggestion of Poppy Quattlebaum.  I chaired the Committee on the Supreme Court in the mid-00’s, and I also chaired and served on a number of State and City Bar Committees along the way.  I re-engaged more actively with NYCLA when Michael McNamara asked me if I would help with financial and endowment planning in connection with the then-pending 14 Vesey Street building sale.  That led to my becoming Treasurer when Steve Lessard was president, which is actually the role where I thought I added the most value to this organization.  It is an honor and a privilege to become your president, and I hope by this time next year to be able to show you that the confidence the Nominating Committee has shown in me was justified.  Thank you.  Let’s have a drink.