Over four days in July, roughly 30 judges, sitting and retired, state and federal, climbed on and off a bus at courthouses, coffee shops, a Cracker Barrel, and community centers and libraries from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The goal was straightforward — to visit with people in their communities to talk about why the rule of law matters in their everyday lives. They engaged one on one, in small groups and in front of large audiences.
The tour was called Justice in Motion, and was created and run by our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, together with Keep Our Republic. We borrowed the model from judges in Poland, who figured out, the hard way, how to defend an independent judiciary when the traditional tools weren’t enough.
We think that borrowed playbook is worth explaining, because we’re planning to use it again, and we encourage you to take similar bold action during this perilous time.
Where the idea came from
Last October, The Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program brought a delegation of U.S. lawyers to Warsaw for a study tour, to sit down directly with the Polish judges and lawyers who had spent the better part of a decade defending their courts. They were joined by democracy leaders from Georgia, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, as well as the Hungarian Helsinki Committee.
Participating in that trip was where we first heard in detail how the judges in Poland decided to come out of their courtrooms to march through the streets of Warsaw in support of their judicial independence. They then organized themselves to visit citizens in villages and towns across the country to talk about why the rule of law and an independent judiciary mattered to everyone.
The tour’s lessons were later written up by two of its organizers — Leanne Webster of the Carter Center’s Rule of Law Program and Melissa Hooper of the German Marshall Fund — in a Harvard Social Impact Review essay, “Turning Back the Tide of Authoritarianism.”
Starting in 2015, Poland’s governing party moved methodically to bring the judiciary under its control: it took over the Constitutional Tribunal, restructured the body that selects judges so that the ruling party effectively chose its members, and created a disciplinary chamber that could punish judges for rulings the government disliked. These tools were used against judges the Carter team met with, to fire them for speaking up for the judiciary or raising questions about judicial appointments, and to replace them with loyalists. All of these actions were framed as democratic accountability rather than capture.
What we found instructive wasn’t the attack — that pattern is familiar by now — it was the response. Polish judges organized through relationship-building, proactive media relations and organizations like Iustitia, a Polish independent judges association, and Themis, another group of judges supporting an independent judiciary. Both were instrumental in mobilizing judges in Poland.
That work built toward the iconic March of a Thousand Robes on Jan. 11, 2020. Judges, prosecutors and lawyers from roughly 20 countries walked in silence from Poland’s Supreme Court to its parliament building, even passing by the President’s office. Most of them wore their judicial robes, and they were joined by thousands of ordinary Poles lining the route. City officials estimated the crowd at 30,000. They were joined by their judicial brethren from across Europe — a judicial tour de force, judges standing and walking together in a tremendous demonstration of the power of collective action.
About a year later, judges got into vans, traveling from town to town into places where a sitting judge was someone you might never see. Judges set up in town squares and school auditoriums to hand out pocket copies of the Polish constitution and walk residents through what it actually said.
Judges who had been forced off the bench did some of the heaviest lifting, since they had nothing left to lose professionally by talking to reporters and shopkeepers. They spoke about what due process meant and why courts weren’t supposed to answer to whichever party held power that year. One of them, suspended from his own courtroom, relentlessly toured the country.
Poland’s governing party lost power in 2023, and most analysts who study the period believe the judiciary’s years-long campaign, including both the vans and the march, was a meaningful part of why.
Why we borrowed this model
Until the last few years, the idea that federal judges in the United States would need to speak to the public beyond the walls of their courtrooms or the words of their opinions was frowned upon, other than periodic school civics classes or university lecture halls. State judges have had more latitude, given that in many states they are elected to office.
But it has become increasingly clear in the U.S. that the role of the independent judiciary — to fairly resolve disputes and act as a check on the other branches of government — is unclear to many Americans. According to Gallup, trust in the judiciary has fallen to 48 percent — down from more than 60 percent before 2022. The Supreme Court’s 33 percent approval rating in July was the lowest since the early 2000s.
Previous Coverage
How movements can make courts play their role in defending democracyFurthermore, threats to judges, their families and their staff have risen sharply in recent years. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently testified on Capitol Hill about the surge — the U.S. Marshals Service recorded 564 threats against federal judges in the last fiscal year, up from 509 the year before.
We knew from our own experience the power of visiting communities to listen, learn and engage in dialogue. This same instinct was behind Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s bus trips across the country in 1992. (Steve, one of the co-authors of this article, traveled on each of the 10 bus trips as Al Gore’s deputy press secretary.) Ross Perot’s cross-country “United We Stand” tour drew on the same instinct, as did, decades later, the Tea Party Express. Whatever the cause, the impulse was the same: get off the stage, get on the road and meet people where they live, in their communities and neighborhoods. Engage in dialogue. Listen carefully. Answer questions.
As we launched our organization, Democracy Rising Collaborative, to educate, organize and mobilize lawyers, retired judges and civic leaders for collective action, the idea of a bus trip as a kind of listening tour began to take hold. We drafted a concept paper and shared it with a few trusted colleagues in the pro-democracy space, including colleagues who had been on the Warsaw trip. The feedback was universally positive. Before long, we were talking about actually doing a judges’ bus tour with our tremendous partner Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic education organization committed to the vitality of U.S. democracy by promoting trust in elections, the rule of law and constitutional checks and balances.
Lessons from Poland, brought to the Great Lakes
1. Organizing matters. One judge speaking out is easy to dismiss as an outlier. Some 30 judges from different states, different courts and both parties, appearing together under one banner, are much harder to write off. That’s when the message stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like the profession itself telling you something.
2. Creativity is essential. We owe this one first to Romania’s Funky Citizens, whose team told the delegation that civic engagement has to be joyful and shareable, or it never leaves the room it happened in. Earnestness alone doesn’t travel. We built Justice in Motion as a way to connect with ordinary Americans in their own communities, while keeping in mind that we needed the story of the trip to travel far and wide.
Communications was key — but getting the experience right for the participants themselves mattered just as much. The judges did this by stopping at a donut shop in Wheeling, West Virginia instead of a podium, and holding purple roses — an international symbol of judicial independence — outside courthouses. These clips spread on social media well past the reporters who were actually there. None of that was decoration. That was the point.
We also borrowed from an organizer’s account of the Tour de Konstytucja, Poland’s own cross-country Constitution Tour, and its four rules: citizens at the center, no party politics, no party funds, no politicians on stage. Their judges showed up in jeans and T-shirts, with cake, rock music and a reading of the constitutional preamble at every stop. They wore white T-shirts emblazoned with “Konstytucja,” or “Constitution” in Polish — a clear and simple statement of what they stood for.
As the delegation heard, authoritarian power feeds on alienation and division, and so the project was about rebuilding that connection. We didn’t replicate every element, but the instinct showed up in our events — meant to feel like conversations rather than hearings — and in the purple roses our own judges carried instead of pins, a small visual signature of their own.
3. Locality makes the difference. We didn’t want one press conference in a state capital. We wanted a bus tour through big cities and small towns: a coffee shop and courthouse in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, the LeMoyne Community Center in Washington, Pennsylvania, a barbecue in Cleveland, a nearly 100-year-old bakery in Toledo, Ohio and the Grosse Pointe Public Library in Michigan.
That’s where the Polish campaign actually did its work — not in Warsaw, but in the towns national reporters usually didn’t visit. The delegation came back with the same warning we kept in mind while building our route: democracy defense that stays in a handful of big cities never reaches the people who most need to hear the case for independent courts, because they’re the ones least likely to encounter it otherwise.
Our Wooster, Ohio meet-and-greet drew about 150 residents to a town square on a very hot Wednesday afternoon. Judicial independence stays an abstraction until someone explains it to you, in a room you’re already in, and patiently answers your questions.
4. Solidarity, solidarity, solidarity. In Poland, solidarity wasn’t just a slogan, it involved taking action. It meant having each other’s backs and showing up, over and over. Lawyers sitting in the gallery at hearings for judges under attack, bar associations funding judges whose salaries had been suspended, campaigns telling the public that people were watching and that no judge stood alone. Judges gathered outside their courthouses on the 18th of every month; supporters mailed postcards that read, in effect, I’ve got your back.
Justice in Motion tried to build that same solidarity in reverse: Rather than waiting for a judge to come under attack and then rallying to defend them, we sent retired and sitting judges out first to build the civic relationships and public trust that make solidarity possible before it’s ever tested.
That meant making sure judges weren’t the only ones standing at the front of the room. We mobilized local bar associations at many of our stops — including the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association — so the message came from the legal community as a whole and not just the bench. Attorneys Rachel Cohen and Brenna Trout Frey joined the tour for the same reason: so that judges weren’t out there on their own, but stood with allies who had been through their own reckoning. The business community showed up too, including Leadership Now’s Richard Stoff in Columbus, Ohio, because an independent judiciary isn’t a legal abstraction to employers and local economies; it’s part of what makes a place stable enough to invest in.
None of this was incidental. It was the same lesson from Poland: no one advocating for courts should stand alone.
5. Remember history. One of the delegation’s hosts pressed a question built for this moment: what freedom-fighting story does America already have on hand and why aren’t we using it? He pointed to the country’s own revolutionary founding, Black civil rights leaders, disability rights advocates and union organizers, who made the case for fairness to people who started off unconvinced.
Our judges took that instruction literally. At every stop, they didn’t talk about constitutional doctrine; they talked about a longer American habit of ordinary people insisting that the rules apply to everyone — and they did it in a year built for exactly that story, the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.
6. Documentation is power. In Warsaw, we heard how much a short, well-made film can do that a press release can’t. Free Courts (“Wolne Sady” in Polish) was formed by Polish lawyers focused on providing information about the importance of a free and independent judiciary. It had learned it the hard way: their first video of lawyers earnestly explaining the constitution went nowhere. Then they reshot the idea as a soccer match where one team simply stops following the rules and starts attacking the referees. That one traveled.
A good film gets shared person to person and gives people something to sit with after the news cycle has moved on. We took the lesson seriously enough to put a documentary team on the bus for the entire tour, and we’re now producing a 10-minute film of the trip: the stops, the conversations, the judges themselves explaining, in their own words, why they got on the bus. It’s meant to do after the fact what the tour did in person — reach people who never had the chance to see us live.
What the tour actually did
On the ground, we reached several thousand people directly, meeting them where they already were to talk about why the rule of law matters to their own lives: how your money is there when you go to the bank, how the medicine you buy at the pharmacy is safe — or will be recalled if it isn’t. Turnout exceeded even our best expectations, which told us there’s real appetite for this conversation and that it resonates more coming from someone standing in front of you than from a headline.
Pairing sitting judges with retired ones, and keeping every stop strictly nonpartisan, also created a permission structure: judges still bound by codes of conduct could show up and participate without crossing an ethical line.
That local work ultimately translated into a much larger reach. Sarah Wire of USA Today asked if she could join us for the whole trip. Putting a reporter on the bus for four days carried some risk, but it paid off — with a strong story online and then the front page, above the fold, a few days later.
Justice in Motion also drew coverage from NPR, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and local outlets in every state we visited — along with footage of judges in their robes, holding purple roses outside courthouses that went viral on social media. Altogether we reached millions of Americans, including plenty who don’t follow politics closely, and mobilized local bar associations and legal communities in each location to help carry the message forward.
We can’t yet claim that those four days changed public opinion about the judiciary — no more than the March of a Thousand Robes did on its own in 2020. What that campaign did was compound, over years, into a public that understood enough to act when it mattered. That’s the model we’re building toward. Justice in Motion was our first stop, not our last, and we’re already planning the next route.