2025 Insider 100: Legal Power List
- Souder Law
- Jul 22
- 2 min read
Download the list here:
This year’s InsiderNJ Legal Power List contains obvious overriding themes central to Constitutional protections amid the ongoing federal prosecution of illegal immigrants. Within that, the May 9th arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka in his own city outside an ICE detention facility and subsequent indictment of U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver for allegedly assaulting, impeding and interfering with masked agents carrying assault weapons placed NJ in the country’s legal crosshairs.
Said U.S. Magistrate Judge André Espinosa in the aftermath: “An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence.”
What about the arrest of an unknown and supposedly un-honored individual? The Constitution protects his or her rights to due process, and against unreasonable searches and seizures, a fundamental priority of our system, in fact, which, in its protection of the innocent and the accused, distinguishes the United States of America.
As Americans, we crave a strong legal process to preserve the rights of both sides to argue and refine our brilliant and imperfect system. On the following list you will find prioritized parties at the heart of not only the Baraka and McIver cases, but others, all of them players immersed in arguments with tremendous national implications.
Preceding this list, you will find a quote by our friend, Joe Hayden, whose personal history goes back to that journey he made from Newark to Selma, Alabama, to peacefully participate with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery.
Then, as now, the country’s legal system – embodied by the men and women hereon, lawyers - must rise to negotiate and argue before judges, those delicate matters of Constitutional power, which finally forge that sacred province otherwise known as “We, the people.”