NYC Bar Urges Reform of Laws on Domestic Use of Military Personnel

The New York City Bar Association responds to members’ concerns about local, state, and national issues through its advocacy and activism. Among recent examples is an NYC Bar report publicized in mid-January 2025, requesting Congress to provide greater oversight over two 19th century laws still on the books that hold the potential for misuse. These are the Insurrection Act of 1807 and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. These laws limit how military service members may be deployed as law enforcement within the borders of the United States.

Jurists and scholars have called the Insurrection Act “dangerously vague” and have long urged reform of both laws. For example, proposed reform of the Posse Comitatus Act centers on applying its requirements to the use of the National Guard.

The NYC Bar is calling on the current presidential administration to avoid following through on previous threats to activate the military to quash domestic dissent and to forcibly remove non-citizens without legal status.

In late January 2025, the current administration began using U.S. Air Force airlifters in deportation operations. The federal government has additionally deployed several hundred military personnel to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, repurposed to house deported migrants.

In keeping with generations of legal precedent, the NYC Bar asserts that the Insurrection and Posse Comitatus Acts should only be invoked to deal with large-scale, violent civil unrest, or to assist in safeguarding the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. These are, in fact, the original stated parameters of the acts.

NYWBA Won’t Back Down on Diversity

The New York Women’s Bar Association was among the founding chapters that formed the Women’s Bar Association of New York in 1980. The organization continues its commitment to women members of the profession and to women’s rights in New York and around the world.

The NYWBA recognizes that a truly diverse judiciary has never been more important than it is in 2025. As a new federal administration focuses on shuttering programs designed to open new doors to marginalized groups and women in all aspects of civic and professional life, the NYWBA remains committed to its founding principles.

As numerous studies have shown, diversity is not only a social good in itself, it’s good for business. Diverse teams in corporate, nonprofit, and government spheres produce more creative insights and make better decisions.

In 2023, the NYWBA was one of 12 bar associations that issued a joint statement on the importance of a diverse judiciary. The statement came about as a response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 143 S. Ct. 2141. This decision overturned almost half a century of legal precedent by declaring race-conscious affirmative action – that is, the use of a prospective student’s race as one admission factor in the process of fostering a diverse student body – was unconstitutional.

As the bar associations’ joint statement noted, it is essential that the members of the public who enter our courtrooms see a judiciary as diverse as they are. Such diversity “improves judicial decision-making” and bolsters “trust and confidence” in the outcomes of legal processes.

Moot Court Competition Continues Noted Tradition of Legal Scholarship

The annual National Moot Court Competition celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2025. A program of the American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL), the competition is co-sponsored by the New York City Bar Association’s National Moot Court Competition Committee.

Every year, more than 1,000 law school students from 150 accredited educational institutions participate in the competition. The finalists from fifteen regional events then assemble in New York City. The law school that emerges victorious receives the sum of $2,500 from the ACTL’s Fulton Haight Fund, and the individual student named Best Oral Advocate receives a Fulton Haight Award plaque. The winner of the first national competition, in 1950, was Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC.

It’s long been clear that simulated argumentation develops the skills and confidence of emerging lawyers, and moot court events date back hundreds of years. The first documented instances date to England in the Middle Ages, with the first known moot court in the United States taking place at Harvard University in the early 19th century. Significantly, today’s National Moot Court Competition developed after the Second World War, when leaders in the profession sought innovative ways to recruit the brightest minds in the country.

The National Moot Court Competition provides law students with one of the most challenging and useful exercises possible for their eventual practice of the law. Past participants over the decades have included future Supreme Court justices like Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.