Arguing Class Actions is a monthly column by Adam J. Levitt for the National Law Journal.
Reprinted with permission from the January 5, 2026, edition of the National Law Journal. © 2025 ALM Media Properties, LLC. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.
The breakdown of civics in American life is no longer an abstraction debated in classrooms or lamented in policy journals. It is a lived reality, shaping how Americans speak, how they disagree, and how they relate to institutions that once commanded broad respect. Nowhere is this erosion more visible—or more consequential—than in the legal system. The legal profession, long understood as a steward of constitutional values, has not been immune to that erosion. Lawyers and judges now operate in an environment where shared assumptions about truth, legitimacy, and institutional roles have weakened, producing effects that are corrosive, destabilizing, and increasingly difficult to reverse.
Civics, properly understood, is neither nostalgia nor the rote memorization of governmental structure. Rather, it is the collective agreement that certain norms, rules, and processes remain binding, even when they yield outcomes that we may dislike. Civics reflects an understanding that facts exist independent of ideology, that institutions derive authority from legitimacy rather than force, and that disagreement does not require delegitimization. It also assumes that losing a dispute does not entitle the loser to reject the system that produced the loss. In this sense, civics is less about patriotism than it is about restraint—restraint in speech, restraint in conduct, and restraint in how power is exercised and contested. A society that forgets its civic foundations inevitably forgets how to govern itself.
For generations, lawyers absorbed these lessons as part of professional culture. They learned them through mentorship, judicial example, and shared expectations about conduct, often as much as through formal instruction. Young lawyers were taught—sometimes gently, sometimes (very) sharply—that credibility is finite, reputation matters, and short-term gains achieved through exaggeration or bad faith come at a steep cost over the course of a career. Civics was the invisible architecture supporting the adversarial system without overwhelming it. It allowed fierce disputes to coexist with institutional stability, enabling lawyers to argue aggressively while accepting outcomes without questioning the legitimacy of the forum or their opponents.
That shared understanding has frayed. We now inhabit a civic environment in which institutional trust has collapsed, accountability is reframed as persecution, and civic restraint is mistaken for weakness or complicity. Assertions are increasingly untethered from reality, while error is recast as attack. The willingness to say “I was wrong” has been replaced by reflexive deflection, and correction is treated not as a virtue but as a threat. This shift is not merely rhetorical; it reflects a deeper rejection of the idea that shared standards exist at all. Coupling that reality with the equally disturbing theater of deeply personal opponent and claim vilification (as with the blogs that perpetually engage in the reductive analysis of “defense win good, plaintiffs’ win bad”), and we, as a bar, are left with a level of unacceptable—and highly destructive—institutional toxicity.
Such a breakdown is deeply destructive to legal culture, where truth, accuracy, and good faith should be non-negotiable. The effects on legal practice are unmistakable. Advocacy increasingly drifts from disciplined legal argument toward political theater. Briefs resemble press releases aimed at sympathetic audiences, rather than efforts to persuade neutral decision-makers. Hyperbolic accusations, insinuations of bias, and rhetorical excess appear with a frequency that would once have been professionally disqualifying. Lawyers increasingly frame losses as evidence of corruption rather than error, and adverse rulings as illegitimate, rather than incorrect. Even routine professional courtesies—reasonable extensions, stipulations to uncontested facts, and genuine meet-and-confer efforts—are withheld as tactical weapons, as though cooperation itself were ideological surrender.
This is not zealous advocacy. It is the infection by a post-civic political culture into a system that depends on shared norms to function. The adversarial system presumes disagreement, but it also presumes a baseline commitment to process and good faith. Courts cannot operate when lawyers treat facts as malleable, rules as optional, opponents as enemies, and institutions as illegitimate whenever they disappoint. Nor can judges fairly adjudicate disputes when every ruling is framed as proof of political allegiance, rather than legal judgment. The rule of law presupposes a common commitment to procedure. When that commitment erodes, outcomes lose meaning regardless of their correctness, and judicial authority becomes fragile, even when lawfully exercised.
The judiciary, however, cannot claim exemption from responsibility for this dynamic. Judges sit at the intersection of law and legitimacy, and their conduct shapes how the public understands the justice system. While many judges continue to model restraint, rigor, and professionalism, others—sometimes inadvertently, sometimes less so—have also contributed to the erosion of civic norms. Opinions occasionally lapse into rhetorical excess, impatience hardens into dismissiveness, and judicial commentary edges toward ideological signaling. Even when motivated by understandable frustration with bad-faith advocacy, these choices matter. They teach lawyers what behavior will be tolerated and teach the public what kind of institution the courts have become.
Judges today are routinely asked to resolve disputes that are fundamentally political, cultural, or symbolic—disputes once mediated through legislatures, elections, or civic institutions rather than courts. That burden is unfair, but unavoidable. The response must be institutional discipline, rather than reaction. When courts appear partisan, performative, or contemptuous of litigants, they reinforce the very cynicism that undermines their authority. Judicial legitimacy is not asserted; it is accumulated slowly and lost quickly. The judiciary’s power rests less on enforcement than on consent, and consent depends on civic trust.
The combined effect of these trends is a legal system under visible strain. Lawyers increasingly approach litigation as warfare, rather than problem-solving. Judges are forced to police conduct that once policed itself through professional norms. Litigants treat outcomes not as applications of law, but as validations or repudiations of identity. And the public, watching from a distance, absorbs the lesson that law is merely politics by other means. That perception is fatal to a system designed to channel disagreement into reasoned resolution, rather than raw power. Indeed, when courts lose their distinctiveness from politics, they lose the very quality that justifies their authority.
This erosion is not merely regrettable; it is strategically and professionally self-defeating. The legal profession’s authority rests on the assumption that it operates according to standards higher than those governing ordinary political combat. Lawyers are officers of the court precisely because they’re expected to privilege truth over narrative, process over passion, and institutional integrity over short-term advantage. When lawyers abandon those commitments, they don’t gain leverage; rather, they squander their credibility. When courts respond in kind, they accelerate the loss of public confidence that makes their decisions meaningful beyond the immediate parties. A legal system perceived as merely another political arena can command compliance for a time, but never lasting obedience or respect—and compliance endures only as long as power does.
The solution is neither simple nor optional. It requires a deliberate recommitment to civics—not as a slogan, but as a professional obligation. Lawyers must relearn, and teach, that credibility matters, that facts are non-negotiable, and that persuasion requires discipline. Judges must insist on rigor and civility, while recognizing their own role in modeling those values. Law schools must teach not only doctrine, but the civic architecture that gives doctrine meaning—the norms that allow law to function as law, rather than as politics in robes. Bar associations must treat professional norms as enforceable standards, rather than aspirational ideals, and must be willing to defend those standards even when doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular.
Most importantly, the legal profession must recover a sense of institutional patriotism: loyalty not to parties or personalities, but to the structures that make self-government possible. Courts are not stages. Litigation is not performance art, disagreement is not betrayal, and accountability is not persecution. Civics teaches restraint in victory and humility in defeat—qualities essential to a system that depends on voluntary compliance rather than coercion.
Civics is not optional. It is the price of admission to a functioning legal system and a functioning Republic. Without it, law becomes noise, institutions become targets, and power replaces persuasion. With it, disagreement remains possible without collapse, and justice remains something more than a partisan claim. If the American legal profession cannot lead the restoration of civic norms—by example, by discipline, and by recommitment to shared truths—it should not be surprised when the American public concludes that no one else will.
Adam J. Levitt is a founding partner of DiCello Levitt, where he heads the firm’s class action and public client practice groups. He can be reached at alevitt@dicellolevitt.com.
