Laurence Tribe

A White House Commission studying changes to the U.S. Supreme Court voted unanimously to send its report to President Joe Biden after sidestepping the most controversial proposals to expand the court’s membership or limit the justices’ terms. Members, who voted 34-0 Tuesday, emphasized that their approval of the final report doesn’t signal support for all the proposals examined by the panel. ... Some may be disappointed that the report doesn’t make specific recommendations, said former U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner, who said she supports changes to the court. “But that was not our charge,” Gertner said. Instead, “the tasks set before us was to capture that deep, live, and consequential debate, fully and fairly, without short changing either side,” said Harvard Law School Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo. ... The commission concluded that the least controversial changes, like term limits, were the hardest to enact, said Harvard Law School Professor Larry Tribe. And the most controversial—expanding the number of justices—the easiest to do, he added.

A high-stakes game of chicken between former Trump advisers and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection could enter a new phase Saturday, when former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark is expected to appear as ordered, but may invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to answer a broad swath of questions. ...Garland “clearly knew that many people he respects, including me, were growing impatient with what we saw as the glacial pace of the process leading to this indictment,” longtime Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe, who taught the future judge and attorney general, wrote in an email. “But he no doubt also knew that a number of experienced former federal prosecutors kept insisting publicly that several weeks was to be expected in a case of this magnitude and sensitivity.”

Happy the elephant will get her day in court, and potentially open the door for other animals to follow, with the help of high-profile advocates who contend the lumbering zoo resident deserves a fundamental legal right. In a potentially groundbreaking case, famed Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe has joined philosophers, theologians and a menagerie of others in arguing that Happy is a “legal person” with the corresponding right to seek freedom from what Tribe calls “her imprisonment” by the Bronx Zoo. “Now fifty years old, Happy remains in solitary confinement, unable to lead a physically, intellectually, emotionally and socially complex life despite her capacity to do so,” Tribe and several other prominent law professors wrote in a legal brief filed late last month. Tribe’s amicus brief is the latest of many to be filed with the New York state Court of Appeals, which sometime next year will hear the Nonhuman Rights Project argue that Happy, just like a person, enjoys habeas corpus protections (Greenwire, Dec. 18, 2020).

The Department of Justice announced this week that it would crack down on airline passengers who throw tantrums. Now, if Attorney General Merrick Garland would only get around to doing something about people who plot the overthrow of our government and a former president who’s serially obstructed justice and abused power we might be getting someplace. ... Revered legal scholar, Laurence Tribe, who taught Garland when the attorney general was a student at Harvard Law School, suggests we give his former student a little more time, but not an unlimited amount. He hears the clock ticking too. Tribe told me, “If Merrick Garland hadn’t authorized the Bannon indictment when he did, I’d certainly have gotten mad long since. At least with respect to someone like me, he bought a few weeks with that indictment—but not a few months.” “All things considered,” he continued, “I’ll be both disappointed and angry if we find ourselves going into January 2022 without strong evidence—in a town that leaks like a sieve—that DOJ is moving full speed ahead on holding Trump and his enablers, facilitators, funders and co-conspirators criminally accountable for the coup d’état they tried to pull off and the violent insurrection they mounted against the Capitol to delay, obstruct and, if possible, subvert the solemn electoral proceeding there underway.”

An article by Jill Lepore: Amicus briefs have been filed on Happy’s behalf by a legion of the country’s most respected lawyers, philosophers, and animal behavioralists, including Laurence Tribe, Martha Nussbaum, and the much-celebrated scientist Joyce Poole, who has studied elephants for nearly as long as Happy has been alive, and who co-directs ElephantVoices, a nonprofit research center that studies elephant communication, cognition, and social behavior. Briefs in support of the WCS, on the other hand, as Tribe pointed out to me in an email, have been filed instead by “groups with a strong economic self-interest,” such as the National Association for Biomedical Research, which claims that establishing personhood for Happy risks the future of all laboratory testing on all animals. ... In 2016, after the NhRP filed a second habeas corpus petition for Kiko, Harvard’s Laurence Tribe submitted an amicus brief, ​​disputing the court’s claim that Kiko could not be a person on the ground that persons bear both rights and duties. The court’s definition of personhood, he argued, “would appear on its face to exclude third-trimester fetuses, children, and comatose adults (among other entities whose rights as persons the law protects).”

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon surrendered to federal authorities on Monday, and was later released on his own recognizance after surrendering his passport. Bannon has been charged with two counts of contempt of Congress thanks to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s commitment to restoring the rule of law. By demonstrating that severe sanctions follow the flouting of subpoenas, whether from Congress or the courts, the Justice Department has sent a clear message to other witnesses that Bannon’s path of defiance can result in very real consequences — including possibly jail.

Norm Eisen, former ethics czar and lawyer who helped Democrats during the first impeachment of Donald Trump, reassured those demanding accountability for corruption under former President Donald Trump in a new interview with Business Insider. ... Trump is facing tax charges from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office as well as possible voter fraud charges by Fulton County DA Fani Willis. After a 8 months in office, Garland hasn't made any public moves on anything involving the former president, his staff or corrupt cabinet officials who were never charged after investigations by the Office of Special Counsel. "Atlanta is moving faster than DC. Where oh where is Merrick Garland? The DOJ seems strangely AWOL," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe asked in a tweet.

Constitutional Law Professor Laurence Tribe joins Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the new ruling that Donald Trump must turn over records to the Jan. 6 committee and why he believes Merrick Garland “should have acted already” in the criminal contempt referral of Steve Bannon. ...Tribe: ...I was finishing reading the remarkably powerful opinion by Judge Chutkan. It`s a 39-page opinion dissecting closely all of the arguments that have made by Donald Trump`s lawyers claiming that even though he`s no longer the president, he has executive privilege to prevent the turning over of hundreds of government documents, presidential documents, presidential logs, information about what he knew and when he knew it from the concept that somehow he could prevent turning that over. She rejected that argument. We only have one president at a time and that president is not Donald Trump.

Watch: On Monday's edition of CNN's “OutFront,” Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe weighed in on Supreme Court arguments over the Texas abortion ban.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has emerged as one of the most conspicuous anti-science politicians during the COVID-19 pandemic, officially sued President Joe Biden's administration on Thursday in response to its vaccine mandate for federal contractors. “Because the government's unlawful vaccine requirements seek to interfere with Florida's employment policies and threaten Florida with economic harm and the loss of federal contracts, the State seeks relief from this Court,” read the 28-page lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Tampa. The document singled out Biden's Sept. 9 address announcing vaccine mandates, implying that the administration also believes the government should not mandate vaccines but is ignoring the law because the president's “patience” has been “wearing thin" and he is angry “at those who haven't gotten vaccinated.” It also argued that complying with Biden's mandates would cause economic harm to the state. ... “I would say this DeSantis lawsuit is between manifestly groundless and utterly frivolous,” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email. “The executive actions DeSantis has sought to depict as lawless are well within the president's statutorily delegated authority.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland has re-established a Justice Department office that aims to expand services for people who can’t afford lawyers, making good on a promise by President Joe Biden. The Office for Access to Justice, included in a new agency flow chart Garland signed on Thursday, is part of his broader plan to expand legal services in the federal government for low-income Americans. ... The plan is “a solid start,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who led the office under Obama, said in a statement. “It remains to be seen how effectively those plans will be implemented, but I have every reason to be optimistic.”

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe rejects former President Donald Trump’s arguments against the release of documents relating to the U.S. Capitol riot as “truly laughable.” Trump this week filed a lawsuit seeking to block or at least delay the release of records to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 violence, which he was impeached for inciting. The ex-president called it an “illegal fishing expedition” and cited executive privilege, even though he’s no longer in office. On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” Tribe said Trump’s claim “that he is not trying to hide the truth, but just preserve the Constitution, is really quite laughable.” Tribe also dismissed Trump’s view that it would be “unconstitutional” for President Joe Biden’s view of executive privilege to override his own. That was “mistaken,” said Tribe. “And his argument that there is no legitimate legislative purpose is truly laughable,” Tribe added.

Former president Donald Trump is suing to block the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol from receiving records for its inquiry into the events of that day as well as Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Trump and his attorneys argue that the records requests are overly broad and have no legislative purpose, and they criticize President Biden for not asserting executive privilege to block the handover of those documents. ... Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, called the suit a “very weak complaint” and scoffed at a key argument in the lawsuit. “The idea that Congress has no legitimate purpose in making this request is almost insane. In fact, no purpose could be higher on the totem pole than protecting the Republic from a coup,” he said. Tribe said that there was one part of the lawsuit that did not seem frivolous: The complaint about overbroad requests for documents. He predicted that a judge might agree to narrow the scope of requested documents.

An op-ed by Laurence H Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky, Jeffrey Abramson and Dennis Aftergut: Sadly, predictably and appallingly, on October 14, a three judge panel of the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit has allowed Texas’s “Bounty-Hunter” anti-abortion law to go back into effect while the court considers the case on the merits. Every day that the fifth circuit panel’s unlawful order keeps the statute in operation brings irreversible injury to women in Texas. US Attorney General Merrick Garland has properly decided to seek emergency relief from the US supreme court. The justice department is right to accuse the State of Texas of seeking to destroy not only abortion rights but also the foundation of our constitutional Republic. In a nation whose history is fraught with battles between states’ rights and national sovereignty, the case of United States v Texas raises issues basic to our national compact.

Nearly two years after getting away with obstruction of Congress while he was president, Donald Trump may get away with it again, this time as a former president trying to block an investigation into the insurrection he incited. ... That history, Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said, would go a long way toward proving the “corrupt intent” that prosecutors would need to show. “The former president’s corrupt and self-serving motive of concealing his role in the attempted coup and the ensuing insurrection by invoking an executive privilege that is no longer his to invoke should be possible to establish,” Tribe said. “With that motive established, there’d be a strong case for charging Trump’s interference with the special committee’s Jan. 6 inquiry as a criminal obstruction of Congress and of justice.”

Since Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives in 2019, they have doggedly used Congress’s power to compel documents and testimony from Donald Trump and those in his orbit – and more often than not, they have butted up against a Trumpian wall of disparagement, denial, and delay. ... According to Harvard Law School Emeritus Professor Laurence Tribe, executive privilege does not exist for former presidents. “We have only one president at a time,” Mr Tribe told The Independent, “and the constitutional presumption is that the incumbent president is the best judge of the factors bearing on whether and when to invoke executive privilege to withhold documents or testimony.”

If there was a glimmer of optimism last week that Texas’s authoritarian new abortion law would soon be overturned in the courts, the hope was swiftly dashed. On Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law known as S.B. 8 — the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country, a de facto abortion ban — as part of a lawsuit the Justice Department has brought against the state of Texas. ... “The attorney general should announce, as swiftly as possible, that he will use federal law to the extent possible to deter and prevent bounty hunters from employing the Texas law,” wrote Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe. “If Texas wants to empower private vigilantes to intimidate abortion providers from serving women, why not make bounty hunters think twice before engaging in that intimidation?”

Last year, George Washington's presidential administration became surprisingly relevant to today's politics — not only because of his prescience with regards to so many of America's current political ills, or his founding father status. Rather Washington, like Trump and now Biden, had to fight a raging pandemic. ..."I'm looking hard, but I have yet to see a vaccination or mask mandate relating to COVID-19 from the Biden administration that I think comes even close to the line of unconstitutionality or lack of executive authority," Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar at Harvard University who specializes in constitutional law, told Salon by email.

Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a 394-page interim report Thursday that details efforts by the Trump White House to pressure senior officials in the Department of Justice to help promote false claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud in order to undo results in states where Donald Trump had lost, including Georgia and Pennsylvania. ... Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, is one of the nation’s pre-eminent constitutional scholars. He advised House managers during Trump’s first and second impeachment and has been highly critical of his administration. Tribe spoke to the Gazette about the report’s early findings and what effect it could have on the Department of Justice. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Transcript: All In with Chris Hayes, 10/6/21 ... Tonight, new progress from the select committee as Trump aides defy subpoenas. Stacey Abrams on today's big hearing for voting rights and Laurence Tribe on a threat to democracy no one is talking about. ... HAYES: Laurence, I feel like we've all learned a lot about the plumbing of the Electoral College and the complicated system by which under both the United States constitution, the 12th Amendment, and the electoral count act as well as state law, you get this sort of transmission from the votes go in and the president comes out over here. And it does seem like that is subject to a lot of hanky-panky they tried last time but is still vulnerable. LAURENCE TRIBE, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: Absolutely. And Stacey Abrams is right on the front lines of trying to reduce the vulnerability and it's important to do that. But even if voting rights are fully protected and people get to vote and their votes are not audited out of existence, we still have a lot of plumbing to go through. And after people vote, there are a lot of processes by which those who really have no respect for law or for the constitution can turn the system inside out and upside down. And that's why people like me are quite vigilant about making sure that we do everything we can to prevent a bloodless coup from taking place even before another insurrection.

For a few hours inside the ransacked Capitol on January 6, then–Vice President Mike Pence helped to preserve the democratic order by insisting that he was powerless to change the outcome of the election. On January 6, 2025, that responsibility could fall to Vice President Kamala Harris, but the task of preventing a stolen presidential election won’t be that simple. ... Should Trump or his acolytes try to subvert the 2024 election, the last Democrat with any power to stop the steal—or at least try to—would be Harris. “She’s certainly going to have quite a job on her hands on January 6, 2025,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and liberal constitutional scholar, told me. Nine months ago, Tribe and other Democrats praised Pence for interpreting his authority narrowly, but the next time around, they might ask Harris to wield the same gavel more forcefully.