The American legal system is in crisis, and nowhere is that more clear - and more important to accurately document - than in the conduct of its government attorneys. GLOW - the Government Lawyers Oversight Watchdog - was founded to develop a comprehensive database of the conduct of America's lawyers, as a resource for the public, journalists, and researchers. The database - located at https://glowlaw.org/ - documents both the ways in which some government attorneys have heroically stood up for the rule of law, often at great professional cost, and also the way that others have blackened their reputations by failing that test of integrity.

This fundraiser seeks to raise the $18,000 GLOW needs to keep its doors open for the next year so that we can continue to do our important work. All of our board members and officers are volunteers - none of us takes a salary - and every dollar donated goes to critical and unavoidable expenses we need to function: insurance, hosting costs, and the like. A more detailed explanation is below, but this is relatively simple: We need your help to keep the doors open and the lights on.

WHY GLOW?

The backbone of the American legal system has always been the competence and honor of its participants. Attorneys have duties not only to their clients but to the law and the courts: duties of candor, that require lawyers to always be truthful when making representations of fact, duties of good faith that bar attorneys from bringing claims for an improper purpose or that lack a reasonable basis in the law. Government attorneys, in particular, have a duty to the public they serve: their client is the American people, and they are expected to act accordingly.

And for two centuries, the government's lawyers have upheld that trust admirably. Attorneys in the Department of Justice and other government agencies were famous for their adherence to the rule of law and their broader duties, so much so that courts developed a special "presumption of regularity" that applied to attorneys for the United States: if a government attorney was making a representation, the court could take that to the bank, and any other party alleging that a government attorney had done something improper would need to bring forward significant evidence to back that claim.

No longer. In the Trump era, that presumption of regularity has been lost, as court after court has called out unethical and outrageous behavior from government attorneys who have fallen into line with bad faith demands from the administration, sacrificing their legal ethics at the altar of their career interests.

And yet, at the same time as some government attorneys have failed tests of basic integrity, others have stood up for the rule of law, often at the cost of their jobs.

GLOW's database does the essential work of documenting all of this. We build profiles for America's attorneys, documenting the places in which they have either crossed ethical lines or stood firm in enforcing them, all with links to primary sources (court opinions, transcripts, and other documents) supporting that data. It allows researchers, journalists, and the American public to see for themselves what America's lawyers are up to, and provides a quick way for journalists to check whether a particular lawyer's claims or judicial nominee's positions ought to be taken seriously - or with a very large grain of salt - based on their past conduct. And while our database is beginning with the attorneys of the current administration, our goal is to expand the database to cover any attorney who has represented the government, at any time. Neither misconduct nor integrity has a political valence, and neither is confined to any one administration - so neither will our work.

WHY THE FUNDRAISER?

So why are we running this fundraiser? Well, let's enter the exciting world of budgets and burn rates.

Our webhosting costs us a little over $2,700 per year. Insurance and related costs run $4,617.32 annually. We pay hundreds of dollars of filing fees to obtain and maintain required registrations (and non-profit tax status) in various states. Over the past year, we spent $5,380 on press releases to let the public know about government attorney misconduct. All told, the cost of running GLOW is a little more than $18,000 per year. And that’s without the fulltime staff the organization needs to thrive: A professional fundraiser to ensure that we can continue our work, and a full-time Executive Director to oversee that work as their primary job and with their full attention, rather than in hours snatched from the obligations of a day job, among others. Those staffing expenses are long-term goals to help make GLOW everything it can be. For now, though, we desperately need to raise the $18,000 minimum we need to keep this organization running for another year.

Whether you are donating or just helping spread the word, thank you in advance - we couldn't do this without you