Last month, a group of thirty sitting and retired judges, lawyers, and advocates boarded a bus in western Pennsylvania. They traveled through Ohio and into Michigan on a tour called Justice in Motion. Their mission was not to campaign for candidates or argue specific cases. Instead, the group handed out pocket constitutions and asked people to consider what the rule of law means in everyday life.
The inspiration for this tour came from central Europe. Last October, legal experts visited Warsaw as guests of the Carter Center. They returned with stories of judges facing surveillance, smear campaigns, and prosecution for resisting political pressure.
In Poland, judges had marched through the streets in their robes to protest government attempts to control the courts. That display of defiance, known as the March of 1,000 Robes, resonated deeply with their American counterparts.
A Rare Public Display
In Columbus, the American judges did something unprecedented for most of their careers. They put on their robes and marched from the federal courthouse to the Ohio Supreme Court. They carried purple flowers, an international symbol of an independent judiciary.
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American judges do not usually march.
They rely on restraint to maintain legitimacy, typically speaking only through their written rulings. But the retired justices argued that these are not ordinary times. They wrote that silence carries its own risk when the survival of the courts is at stake. The march in Columbus was not about defending particular decisions. It was about defending the system that allows legal disagreements to be resolved according to law rather than political power.
The group included Justice Michael P Donnelly, a retired justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and Justice Robert F Orr, a retired justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. One is a Democrat, the other a former Republican who is now an independent.
They stated they have disagreed on plenty of issues over the years. That disagreement, they noted, is precisely the point. The rule of law is not a partisan possession.
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More Than Abstractions
In Wooster, Ohio, about 150 people gathered across from the historic courthouse. The conversation moved away from red or blue politics and focused on ordinary life. The judges explained that the rule of law is why money deposited in a bank stays there. It is why contracts are enforced and property is protected.
These protections feel ordinary only because generations built institutions strong enough to make them reliable. When the legal system functions correctly, it remains invisible to the average citizen, providing a stable backdrop for daily transactions and decisions.
If that foundation begins to fracture under political pressure, the immediate impact isn’t always a headline-grabbing scandal, but rather the slow erosion of trust that makes business and personal agreements possible. The judges are trying to prevent this silent decay before it becomes irreversible.
The document emphasizes that judges are trained to exercise restraint. However, the authors argued that restraint should not be confused with silence about the survival of the institution itself. When judges face threats for their rulings, or when adverse decisions are met with demands for retaliation rather than appeals, those who understand the system have an obligation to speak up.
