American judges and the U.S. court systems are targets of a copycat assault ripped from the pages of the global authoritarian playbook. That’s why, in mid-October, the Piper Fund’s Judicial Integrity Project and the German Marshall Fund’s (GMF) Rule of Law Action Network co-hosted “Lessons from Poland for U.S. Judges on Defending the Rule of Law.” Meeting in Oakland, California, about 50 funders, lawyers, judges, and human rights advocates from Poland, Kansas, and California shared cautionary tales even as they began to develop a productive path forward.
Tactics used by political leaders in Poland between 2015 and 2023 to muzzle and harass judges, to discredit independent courts, and to undo the essential checks and balances of a democracy have migrated to Hungary, Turkey, the country of Georgia, and Italy. They’ve landed, too, in the U.S., threatening to disrupt Kansas’ judicial selection process, to dismantle the embattled Immigration Court system.
A new brief from Piper Fund synthesizes perspectives shared at the “Lessons from Poland for U.S. Judges on Defending the Rule of Law” convening and through participant interviews afterward into key takeaways.
It also explores the “Chilling Effect” and the case of the United States vs. Hannah C. Dugan, a judge for nine years in Wisconsin’s Circuit Court and former president of the Milwaukee Bar Association, for allegedly helping an undocumented non-citizen dodge federal immigration agents from the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Dugan’s trial, which begins this month, has the potential to set a dangerous precedent of legal harassment, “show trials,” and character assassination that became all too familiar in Poland.
