Most Americans will never file a bar complaint, draft an amicus brief, or argue over professional conduct rules in a hearing room. Most will never need to. Yet the rule of law does not rest only on dramatic courtroom moments or constitutional crises. It is built, maintained, and sometimes weakened by everyday professional choices, choices about honesty, independence, restraint, accountability, and whether institutions will be used to serve the public or to shield misconduct.
That is what makes Lawyers Defending American Democracy, known as LDAD, worth understanding. LDAD is a national coalition of lawyers, former public officials, legal scholars, and civic advocates working to hold lawyers and public officials accountable when they undermine democratic institutions. Its premise is direct: democracy depends not only on elections and courts, but also on professional norms strong enough to resist abuse. When lawyers use their licenses, positions, or influence to erode constitutional guardrails, the legal profession has both an ethical and civic obligation to respond.
For business leaders, nonprofit boards, civic stakeholders, and professionals across sectors, that message carries a practical lesson. Infrastructure is not only roads, buildings, and utilities. It is also the system of rules, institutions, and trusted practices that allow contracts to be honored, public decisions to be challenged, and power to be limited. The rule of law functions as civic infrastructure, and organizations like LDAD are working to keep it operational.
What LDAD Is and How It Works
LDAD was created to do something many traditional legal institutions have often approached cautiously: organize lawyers and allied professionals from the ground up to defend democracy through direct accountability measures. Rather than functioning mainly as a discussion forum, it operates as an action-oriented coalition. Its work spans litigation support, ethics enforcement, public advocacy, professional organizing, and civic education.
Its five core lines of effort provide the clearest picture of its mission.
Ethics complaints against attorneys
One of LDAD's best-known areas of work is filing or supporting ethics complaints against attorneys alleged to have violated professional conduct rules while participating in efforts that threaten democratic processes. This line of effort treats legal ethics as a living professional standard, not a ceremonial code. The idea is simple: a law license carries duties to the court, to the public, and to the integrity of the legal system. If lawyers abuse that license in ways that promote false claims, obstruct lawful processes, or compromise institutional legitimacy, disciplinary systems should be asked to act.
Amicus briefs on separation of powers and judicial independence
LDAD also participates in appellate and constitutional disputes through amicus briefs. These briefs focus on core structural questions such as separation of powers, judicial independence, voting rights, lawful oversight, and executive constraint. In practical terms, this work gives courts an organized perspective from lawyers concerned with long-term institutional integrity, not just case-specific outcomes.
Open letters and calls to action
The coalition regularly issues open letters, sign-on statements, and public calls to action. These are aimed at legal institutions, public officials, media audiences, and the broader civic community. Their purpose is not only symbolic. Open letters can create a public record, organize professionals around common standards, and signal that silence inside the profession is itself a choice with consequences.
Meeting the Moment
LDAD's "Meeting the Moment" initiative focuses on organizing lawyers and supporters to respond to democratic stress in real time. It is part recruitment tool, part mobilization structure, and part professional network. The initiative reflects LDAD's belief that democratic defense cannot rely solely on a handful of national figures. It needs distributed participation, local coordination, and professionals prepared to act when institutional pressure rises.
Public education
The fifth line of effort is public education. LDAD publishes analysis, toolkits, action guidance, and explanatory materials designed to make abstract constitutional concerns legible to ordinary people. This matters because democratic erosion often happens through technical channels, disciplinary procedure, appointment power, litigation posture, administrative design, and strategic falsehoods. Public education helps translate those mechanisms into terms citizens and professionals can understand and act on.
Origins and Leadership
LDAD traces its origins to 2019, when former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger and Gershon "Gary" Ratner helped launch the organization in response to deepening concern about democratic backsliding and institutional fragility. From the beginning, the concept was intentionally bottom-up. Rather than waiting for the most cautious corners of the legal establishment to move, the founders sought to build an independent network capable of mobilizing faster and speaking more clearly.
That design choice matters. Traditional bar associations play important roles, but they are often constrained by internal politics, member diversity, reputational concerns, and reluctance to appear partisan even when the underlying issue is professional misconduct or constitutional structure. LDAD was built outside that institutional caution. It aimed to create a vehicle for lawyers who believed the profession needed a more assertive response when legal actors participated in anti-democratic conduct.
Executive Director Lauren Stiller Rikleen has been a central public leader in translating that vision into durable programming. Under her leadership, LDAD has tied legal ethics, constitutional design, and professional responsibility into a broad organizing framework. The coalition's voice is civic-minded and institution-focused, not personality-driven. Its argument is that legal accountability should be understood as democracy maintenance.
The Eight Pillars of Democratic Accountability
LDAD frames its work around Eight Pillars that define the conditions necessary for a functioning constitutional democracy. These pillars are useful because they move the conversation beyond slogans and into institutional essentials.
Rule of law
No person, officeholder, or faction stands above lawful process. Rules must apply consistently enough to sustain public trust.
Checks and balances
Power must be distributed across institutions capable of restraining one another. Concentrated authority without meaningful oversight invites abuse.
Separation of powers
Legislative, executive, and judicial functions must remain sufficiently distinct to preserve accountability and prevent domination by a single branch.
Media integrity
A democratic public depends on credible information channels. Deliberate disinformation and intimidation of truth-telling institutions corrode self-government.
Judicial independence
Courts must be able to decide cases based on law and fact, free from coercion, retaliation, or political capture.
Official truthfulness
Public officials and legal advocates carry special responsibilities not to weaponize falsehoods. Lies from positions of authority distort both law and public judgment.
Independent justice and intelligence agencies
Investigative and enforcement bodies must operate with professional independence rather than as tools of factional loyalty or personal protection.
Civil discourse
A republic requires disagreement that does not collapse into dehumanization, intimidation, or the normalization of lawless conduct.
Taken together, these pillars explain why LDAD treats professional ethics as civic infrastructure. If these supports weaken, legal and economic systems weaken with them.
Track Record and What Accountability Has Looked Like
LDAD points to several concrete accountability outcomes as evidence that sustained professional pressure can matter, even when the process is slow.
Among the most visible examples is Rudolph Giuliani's law license suspension, which became a high-profile demonstration that repeated falsehoods tied to election-related claims could generate real professional consequences. Kenneth Chesebro's disbarment is another frequently cited result in the broader accountability landscape LDAD has supported and highlighted. Jeffrey Clark's recommended disbarment has also been treated as a significant milestone, showing that disciplinary systems can, at times, respond to allegations involving efforts to misuse public office and legal authority.
LDAD has also emphasized litigation-related wins through amicus participation. Its briefs have addressed issues including voting rights, National Guard deployment, and congressional oversight. These are not side disputes. They go to the heart of who can exercise power, under what constraints, and with what remedies when lines are crossed.
The significance of this record is not that every filing produces immediate success. It is that professional accountability can generate cumulative effects. Discipline proceedings create records. Amicus briefs shape legal reasoning. Open letters frame standards. Public education widens the circle of people able to recognize institutional danger before it becomes normalized.
Challenges, Limits, and the Slow Pace of Professional Accountability
An honest assessment of LDAD's work also requires admitting its limits. Professional accountability is often slow, technical, and vulnerable to institutional pressure. Bar systems may dismiss complaints, narrow their scope, or move so gradually that public attention fades long before a final decision arrives.
LDAD and aligned advocates have seen complaints rejected or not advanced against officials such as Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche. Those outcomes underscore a difficult truth: misconduct that appears obvious in public debate may still fail to trigger discipline, or may encounter procedural hurdles, evidentiary limits, jurisdictional questions, or institutional reluctance. Professional systems are not automatic engines of accountability.
There is also a broader challenge of legitimacy. Any effort to police misconduct in politically charged contexts will be accused by some critics of partisanship. That risk does not disappear simply because the underlying concern is ethical rather than ideological. For organizations like LDAD, the burden is to stay grounded in documented conduct, established professional rules, and constitutional principles rather than personality conflict or factional retaliation.
That slower, more constrained reality can be frustrating. Still, the alternative, abandoning professional accountability because it is imperfect, would leave a dangerous vacuum. Institutions rarely improve through neglect. They improve through pressure, participation, and repetition.
Actionable Ways to Engage
LDAD's model is useful because it does not assume only elite litigators or former judges can contribute. It offers paths for both lawyers and non-lawyers.
What lawyers can do
Lawyers can sign the Democracy Commitment, a public affirmation that legal professionals have responsibilities beyond client service when democratic institutions are under strain. They can join Meeting the Moment to plug into organizing, alerts, and coordinated action. They can write op-eds or letters to editors that explain why legal ethics, judicial independence, and truthful advocacy matter to everyday civic life. They can also use LDAD's Guardians of Justice toolkit, which is designed to support public-facing education and engagement around rule-of-law concerns.
Lawyers can also act closer to home. They can participate in bar governance, monitor judicial and disciplinary developments, mentor younger attorneys on professional responsibility, and challenge the normalization of false or reckless advocacy inside their own networks. Sometimes the most important intervention is local and unglamorous.
What everyone else can do
Non-lawyers are not bystanders in this work. They can sign up for action alerts, submit public comments when hearings or rulemaking processes invite civic input, and show up at local meetings where institutional norms are shaped in public. They can support civic education in schools, nonprofits, libraries, and professional associations. They can read source documents instead of relying only on commentary, and they can reward truthfulness, procedural fairness, and restraint in the leaders they support.
People can also strengthen the broader culture that makes rule-of-law work possible. That includes defending independent journalism, resisting performative cynicism, and refusing to treat constitutional guardrails as abstract concerns for specialists alone. Civic durability depends on habits as much as headlines.
Why This Matters Beyond the Legal Profession
For a holdings company, a board, a founder, a contractor, a property owner, a restaurant operator, or a community nonprofit, the relevance of this topic is practical. Stable enterprise depends on enforceable rules, credible courts, reliable public records, and institutions capable of reviewing abuse. When the rule of law erodes, the damage is not confined to constitutional scholars. It reaches permitting, contracting, insurance, investment, labor relations, public procurement, nonprofit governance, and basic trust.
That is why the phrase "the rule of law as infrastructure" is more than a metaphor. Infrastructure is what allows everything else to function. It is easiest to take for granted when it works, and hardest to rebuild once it has been neglected.
Institutions do not defend themselves. They are sustained by people who show up, use the tools available to them, and recognize that professional responsibility is not separate from democratic responsibility. LDAD's work is one example of that principle in action. Whether through ethics enforcement, legal advocacy, organizing, or public education, the coalition reminds us that accountability is not self-executing. It depends on participation.
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