Tonight, I read two academic letters of public protest against What Is Going On—one from 2,000 of the nation’s top scientists and one from more than 80 Harvard Law School professors. The first letter is about the threat to scientific research, the second about the threat to the rule of law.

Despite being in a discipline adjacent to the teaching and study of law, I felt that it was the letter of the scientists that truly spoke to me about what is politically at stake in this moment. And that was because it was the scientists who spoke the clearest, most direct, most forceful, and least artful, language of political alarm.

At the simplest level, the scientists know how to use strong and direct verbs: gut, fire, pressure, protect, warn, slash, terminate, defund, manipulate, destroy. The lawyers speak like, well, this: “We believe that American legal precepts and the institutions designed to uphold them are being severely tested.”

When the scientists state that they don’t hold the same views, they say this:

We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.

The law professors write like, well, this:

Each of us brings different, sometimes irreconcilable, perspectives to what the law is and should be. Diverse viewpoints are a credit to our school. But we share, and take seriously, a commitment to the rule of law: for people to be equal before it, and for its administration to be impartial. That commitment is foundational to the whole legal profession, and to the special role that lawyers play in our society. As the Model Rules of Professional Conduct provide: “A lawyer is … an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.”

The scientists, as you can tell, write with an assurance in, and confidence about, their audience; the law professors don’t seem to know whom they’re talking to and what they can presume about their audience.

The two letters made me wonder about the political capacities and sensibilities of academic scientists versus law professors. One would think the latter would be more skilled and effective in the art of rhetoric. But that does not seem to be the case.

Perhaps it’s that it’s easier to dramatize the consequences of a broken regime of scientific research versus the rule of lawlessness. But I don’t think that’s it, for two reasons.

First, this is a nation founded by lawyers, teeming with lawyers, obsessed with law and litigation and litigiousness, worshipful of constitutionalism. It shouldn’t be that hard to dramatize what’s at stake, legally. Yet none of the law professors seems to have found a language that can actually speak to the American people.

Second, in the course of speaking about the threat to research, the scientists manage to articulate much more clearly the larger political stakes of a regime of intimidation and coercion—precisely the sort of thing that law professors are supposed to understand and be able to convey. But they don’t. Or can’t.

I don’t know what that tells us about the state of the world, but it’s interesting.