Laurence Tribe

Two days after the 2020 election, Donald Trump Jr texted the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with strategies for overturning the result, CNN reported. “This is what we need to do please read it and please get it to everyone that needs to see it because I’m not sure we’re doing it,” Trump Jr reportedly wrote, adding: “It’s very simple … We have multiple paths[.] We control them all.” One leading legal authority called the text “a smoking rifle”. CNN said the text was sent on 5 November 2020, two days before Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election and the next president. ... Responding to news of Donald Trump Jr’s communication with Meadows, Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said on Twitter: “This text is a smoking rifle.”

In a historic vote today, the U.S. Senate confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to join the U.S. Supreme Court. “What a great day it is for the United States of America, for our system of government, and the grand march of the fulfillment of the sacred covenant we have as an American people: e pluribus unum – out of many, one,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, a pastor of Martin Luther King’s church in Georgia, on the Senate floor. “Ketanji Brown Jackson’s improbable journey to the nation’s highest court is a reflection of our own journey, through fits and starts, toward the nation’s ideals.” ... In 1987, then-Sen. Joe Biden invited constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe to help him prepare for the confirmation hearings of President Ronald Reagan’s controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. They spent hours together, with the liberal Harvard professor playing the role of Judge Bork in mock murder boards. “It was kind of an awkward fit,” admits Professor Tribe, now a professor emeritus at Harvard.

A major presidential scandal isn’t complete without missing evidence, though Donald Trump seems to have been the first president to swallow his own words, literally. The former president had a habit of tearing drafts and signed documents into small pieces to be thrown away—or flushing them down a toilet. And there have even been reports that, on occasion, he consumed them. ... The comparisons to Richard Nixon were immediate and inevitable—but they missed a key difference: What happened in those seven hours should ultimately be knowable, at least at some level. The Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted that the gap in the record made “the infamous 18-minute gap in Nixon’s tapes look like nothing in comparison.” While that brazen presidential manipulation of the historical record ultimately didn’t help Nixon stave off the collapse of his presidency—indeed it likely backfired by creating skepticism toward the president among elite Republicans after its revelation—the gap in a crucial White House tape to this day remains stubbornly difficult to fill in. By contrast, the newly reported Trumpian gap may actually be easier to fill in, and therefore less of a threat to the historical record than Nixon’s.

A conversation featuring Professor Laurence Tribe and Congressman Adam Schiff.

The news that the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 investigation is reaching beyond the Capitol rioters has added fuel to a long-running debate about the pace of the investigation.  One side has criticized the Justice Department for not investigating Donald Trump and his inner circle for subverting the 2020 election. The lack of any public signs of a broader, more aggressive investigation for over a year, they say, shows a troubling lack of urgency. ... To Laurence Tribe, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, the recent reports of Trump-adjacent investigations brought welcome news — if slightly belated. “It’s obviously better late than never,” he said, acknowledging that the grand jury activity reported by The Washington Post and New York Times may have started sooner than the reports let on. “Memories can fade, people can adjust their testimony in light of interim discoveries,” Tribe said. “It would be ideal if this had not waited as long as it apparently has.”

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell speaks to Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe about the mounting pressure that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is facing after text messages his wife sent in the lead-up to the January 6th Capitol riot were made public.

The Justice Department’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 includes $34 million to hire 80 attorneys for the investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection. The department has already brought more than 750 cases, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made clear at a news briefing on Monday that the department is not stopping there. ... The Justice Department will need to make good on its vow to follow the facts wherever they lead. As constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, there is no “honorable way for [Attorney General] Merrick Garland to avoid pursuing the path Judge Carter has not only clearly marked but blazingly illuminated. Short of klieg lights, Carter has pointed the way to criminal investigation and prosecution of the former president as forcefully as a federal judge properly can.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear the pork industry’s challenge to California’s Proposition 12, a law that restricts certain confinement practices in industrial animal agriculture. The law, passed by nearly 63 percent of voters in a 2018 ballot measure, effectively bans “gestation crates”—narrow, metal enclosures with slatted floors that confine pregnant sows to only sitting and standing, and restrict them from turning around. The industry argues the crates, which have been used in large-scale hog farming for more than 30 years, minimize aggression and prevent competition for food. ... But it only takes four of the justices—not a majority—to agree to hear a case, and the pork industry’s legal argument is considered weak by many legal scholars because Prop 12 applies the same standard to products raised in California as it does to those in any other state. “I think the odds are not great for Prop 12, but I wouldn’t give up at all,” said Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. “The Supreme Court’s decisions in this area—going all the way back to the 1920s—I think strongly support California.”

Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said that Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, "must be subpoenaed" by the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack against the U.S. Capitol after her text messages with a top Trump administration official were reported this past week. ... "I agree fully with NYU's Stephen Gillers," Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe posted to Twitter on Friday. "Justice Thomas must take no part in the consideration of any case related to the 2020 election, the 1/6 Committee, the attempted coup, or the insurrection."

Legal experts quickly knocked former President Donald Trump's lawsuit filed Thursday targeting former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and a number of others—calling it "absurd" and "garbage." Trump's attorneys filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida, claiming that Clinton and other members of the DNC "orchestrated an unthinkable plot—one that shocks the conscience and is an affront to this nation's democracy." The alleged plot in question involved falsifying records and manipulating data in an attempt to "cripple Trump's bid for presidency" during the 2016 election, they contend. ... "An absurd lawsuit by an absurdly litigious former president who has only himself to blame for being compromised by Putin and thus looking like he is compromised by Russia," Laurence Tribe, a professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, tweeted on Thursday.

Virginia voted in 2020 to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, the 38th state to do so, pushing the measure past the required three-fourths majority to make ERA the 28th Amendment. It’s not recognized as such yet, but should be, according to two constitutional scholars. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, released today opinion letters from Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus, and Russ Feingold, president of the American Constitution Society. “My conclusion as a constitutional scholar is that the ERA is currently a valid part of the United States Constitution, that Congress should act concurrently to recognize it as such, and that even if Congress takes no such action the Archivist should publish it as the Twenty-Eight Amendment,” Tribe said.

On September 15, 2021, Madi* found herself in the bathroom of her sorority house, holding a positive pregnancy test. The first thought that went through her head when she saw the double lines was, This can’t be happening. She took four more tests to be safe, hoping it was a false positive. But they all confirmed that she was pregnant. The next day, Madi made an appointment with a nearby Planned Parenthood to have an abortion. The earliest slot was in eight days. ... And legal scholars, including Laurence H. Tribe, university professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, predict that the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs will further curtail access. Its ruling may eliminate the fetal viability line, and let states set limits on abortions at whatever week they deem fit, as Texas already has done through what’s been called the “vigilante loophole."

The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States had an image problem from the moment President Biden established it last April, fulfilling a campaign promise that he would examine what might be done with a Court that was “getting out of whack.” The Democratic left, hungry for payback for the two seats they regard Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell as having “stolen,” dismissed it as an effort to shield the president from having to confront their demand to add two or even four additional seats to the Court. Others simply shrugged after noting that Biden asked the thirty-four-member commission—mostly law professors, arrayed from the center-left to the center-right—not for concrete recommendations but simply analysis, for the president’s consideration, of “the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform.” ... “What did the Warren Court stand for?” the legal historian Morton J. Horwitz asked in The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice (1998), a paean to the period. Horwitz and Breyer were both born in 1938. Their contemporaries, titans of liberal constitutional scholarship like Owen Fiss of Yale and Laurence Tribe of Harvard, eventually came to staff and even dominate the nation’s law school faculties. Nearly any member of this cohort, many of them Warren Court clerks like Fiss and Tribe, might have given an answer similar to the one Horwitz offered: “Like no other court before or since, it stood for an expansive conception of the democratic way of life as the foundational ideal of constitutional interpretation.”

An op-ed co-written by Laurence Tribe: On 8 March, a jury took three hours to render a guilty verdict against Guy Reffitt, a January 6 insurrectionist. Donald Trump could not have been pleased. DC is where Trump would be tried for any crimes relating to his admitted campaign to overturn the election. Jurors there would have no trouble finding that the evidence satisfies all statutory elements required to convict Trump, including his criminal intent, the most challenging to prove. That is our focus here. A 3 March New York Times story asserted that “[b]uilding a criminal case against Mr Trump is very difficult for federal prosecutors ... given the high burden of proof ... [and] questions about Mr Trump’s mental state”.

The media have been quick to rubbish Attorney General Merrick Garland for his failure so far to indict former President Trump over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. They have tarred him with epithets worthy of Trump himself, such as “Merrick the Mild” and “Merrick the Meek.” And a host of former prosecutors and law professors have criticized his inaction, saying that Garland needs to indict Trump to vindicate the rule of law. ... Frustrated at the inaction, the redoubtable Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe has called on Garland to appoint a special counsel. Tribe argues that a special counsel is “the best way to reassure the country that no one is above the law, justice is nonpartisan and fears of political fallout will not determine the decision on whether to bring charges.” Tribe says that such an appointment is “imperative.”

An op-ed co-written by Laurence Tribe: Earlier this month, a federal district judge in North Carolina stopped the effort by North Carolina voters to hold Republican Representative Madison Cawthorn accountable for his role in organizing and promoting the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by disqualifying him from running for reelection. As stunning as this decision was, the reasoning the court used to get there is more so. It held that the Amnesty Act of 1872, which granted amnesty to former Confederates, applies to Cawthorn and overrides an explicit constitutional prohibition in the 14th Amendment barring those who “have engaged in insurrection” from holding office. This decision is at odds with the text, history, and logic both of that statute and of the Constitution itself, and cannot be allowed to stand.

Joe Biden is trying to get a historic Supreme Court Justice nominee confirmed while managing the worst military crisis in Europe since World War II. Those around him say he’s more at ease than at other points during his presidency. His Senate tenure, they add, is the reason why. ... Those who’ve known Biden since his early Senate days say he’s not naive about the modern Republican party. “I don’t think he’s living in the past,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar and Biden confidante. “He would love to have as much bipartisan support as possible but he has no illusions.”

An op-ed co-written by Laurence Tribe: The time has come for Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Donald Trump. That step offers the best way to reassure the country that no one is above the law, justice is nonpartisan and fears of political fallout will not determine the decision on whether to bring charges. Several recent developments have brought us to this moment. On March 2, the House select committee investigating the Capitol siege alleged in a federal court filing that it had amassed evidence that Trump illegally schemed to stop the lawful transfer of power to Joe Biden.

A U.S. congressional committee says Donald Trump “engaged in a criminal conspiracy” with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, turning up pressure on the Department of Justice to investigate whether the former president broke the law. In a court filing, the House of Representatives panel probing last year’s Capitol riot says the evidence suggests Mr. Trump and members of his campaign team committed fraud and obstruction of Congress. ... Laurence Tribe, a retired Harvard law professor who once taught Mr. Garland, said he wasn’t sure why the Attorney-General “is doing as little as he apparently is doing.” He said Mr. Garland might believe it would be hard to prove Mr. Trump had the requisite state of mind to commit a crime because he may really have believed he had won the election. But Mr. Tribe said he did not think such a concern was a good reason not to investigate.

Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner urged again for Donald Trump to be indicted after the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack against the U.S. Capitol submitted a court filing on Wednesday—saying it had "a good-faith basis for concluding" that the former president engaged in a "criminal conspiracy." ... "The filing on behalf of the US House said: 'The select committee has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.' DOJ surely has the same, AG Garland," Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, tweeted.

An article co-written by Laurence Tribe: Granting a petition by several states and coal companies, the supreme court on 28 February will address what appears to be a technical legal question: does the Environmental Protection Agency have authority to calculate CO2 emissions targets for power plants based on mitigation techniques involving steps “beyond the fence-line” of individual plants? In truth, the matter the court is considering implicates –and imperils – the federal government’s power to fashion flexible solutions not only to global warming but to all manner of complex problems.