A Jack Cade law is a statute or regulation that has the effect of weakening the rule of law, hindering access to justice or imposing excessive controls on lawyers' capacities to advocate for citizens.
The term has been used in relation to laws that abolished the reimbursement of lawsuit costs by at-fault persons to their innocent victims and laws for the censorship of lawyers' political statements.
They are named after Jack Cade a character in William Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 2 who led a popular rebellion in Kent and whose seizure of power was to be preceded by, in Shakespeare's version, a massacre of lawyers.
References
Jack Cade laws Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA