Laurence Tribe

A group of prominent lawyers, including former governors and judges, urged the California bar on Monday to launch an investigation into John C. Eastman’s role in advising President Trump on how he could overturn his election defeat, including by having his vice president refuse to count the electoral votes in seven states won by President Biden. ... The letter was sent to George S. Cardona, chief trial counsel at the Los Angeles office of the State Bar of California. The signers include former governors Christine Todd Whitman, a New Jersey Republican, and Steve Bullock, a Montana Democrat; retired California Supreme Court Justices Kathryn Werdegar and Joseph Grodin; retired California federal judges Thelton Henderson, Fern M. Smith and Lowell Jensen; and UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

Senior White House officials privately explored as recently as this week whether the Biden administration could continue making payments even after the federal government breaches the nation’s debt ceiling, according to three people familiar with the matter. ...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard legal expert, told The Washington Post in September that while it would violate the Constitution to ignore the debt ceiling it would be an “even more serious” violation for Biden to obey it if that meant violating the 14th Amendment. Tribe on Twitter earlier this week stressed that the president’s “possible authority to spend above the debt ceiling” should not encourage anyone in Congress to take the risks of breaching the debt ceiling. “For anyone to rely on a president’s possible authority to spend above the debt ceiling on his own to avoid default as an excuse not to raise the debt ceiling would be lunacy,” Tribe wrote. “Casting doubt on the legal status of US securities would spike interest rates and crash the stock market.”

... Legal scholars say that if Democrats don't make big changes to limit presidential authority, there's every reason to believe a future White House occupant will try to again push the boundaries of executive power. The consequences, some say, could be dire."Unless Congress soon reasserts some of its power to check the executive branch, the odds that our democracy will last more than another decade or so seem, to me, depressingly low," said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law professor at Harvard. The legislation from Schiff and other House Democrats, Tribe said, would "restore the system of checks and balances that has kept our republic afloat through the most turbulent times."

 An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe, Neil H. Buchanan, and Michael C. Dorf ’90: At the Jan. 6 rally preceding the assault on the Capitol, Rudolph Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” The next speaker was John Eastman. He praised Giuliani’s remarks and then made fantastic claims of voter fraud, including that “secret folders” of ballots were deployed to deny Donald Trump reelection. Who is John Eastman? Like Giuliani, he was once a respected lawyer. Eastman is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the former dean of Chapman Law School. At the time of the insurrection, he remained a tenured professor there. Within weeks, Chapman and Eastman cut ties. Soon he would also forfeit his position as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado.

Treasury officials face an unusually difficult task this fall in projecting precisely when the federal government will no longer be able to pay its bills, a lapse that could trigger a default and plunge America into an economic recession. ... “Yes, it may be a violation of the Constitution for the president to simply ignore the debt ceiling. But it’s even more serious for him to obey the debt ceiling and have default in violation of Section 4,” said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, whose legal advice the administration has repeatedly sought, in an interview.

Former President Donald Trump’s attempts to hide his actions from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which he incited, would need the cooperation of Joe Biden, the man he claims is not the legitimate president ― and that cooperation will not be coming. ... “The compelling interest of both Congress and the Justice Department in investigating attempted coups, failed insurrections and criminal violations of federal election laws would suffice to overcome even an applicable claim of executive privilege,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard.

John C. Eastman, one of the lawyers who advised President Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, reportedly presented Trump with an exquisitely Trumpian plan to have Vice President Mike Pence do his dirty work: Pence should lie. ...By the time he got to Step 3, Eastman dove into territory that Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has described as “jaw-droppingly stupid.”

Rachel Maddow tells the story of how Cambridge, Massachusetts bar, Grendel's Den, whose case to obtain a liquor license over the objections of a neighboring church was argued before the Supreme Court and won by Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, setting a precedent that could put an end to the new Texas abortion ban. ... Tribe: The whole case arose because of this arbitrary power that was given to a private entity. It happened to be a church. But the issue is the same whether it's a church or not. There are cases in which the Supreme Court said you cannot give governmental power over peoples' lives or liberty to private bodies, that have no public accountability.

Republican candidates and conservative activists are planning to attack President Joe Biden's COVID vaccine mandates in court and on the campaign trail, but they face uphill battles in trying to block the plan. ... Laurence H. Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said the threatened lawsuits reflect "ideological commitments rather than genuine constitutional analysis." The threatened lawsuits are more political than legal, he said, adding that Republican comments on the Biden plan are in sharp contrast to "the far greater willingness to support unilateral executive actions by former President (Donald) Trump."

On Thursday, the Biden administration delivered some long-anticipated tough talk on behalf of America’s sane majority. It came from President Biden directly on covid-19 mandates, and from the Justice Department on constitutional order. ... Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe tells me, “By emphasizing the affront to federal supremacy and the rule of law inherent in S.B. 8’s intentional blockage of women’s ability to vindicate their own rights, the complaint reaches beyond Roe v. Wade to encompass a structural attack on the basic design of the extraordinary Texas law.” In laymen’s terms: Enough is enough. Texas simply cannot do this.

When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a restrictive new abortion law in Texas to take effect, pro-abortion advocates turned to the U.S. Department of Justice as a potential last hope of challenging a law they viewed as an existential threat to Roe v. Wade. On Thursday, the Justice Department decided to step in. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the department filed a lawsuit against Texas, calling the abortion law a “statutory scheme” that is “clearly unconstitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent.” ... “It seems to me that although the FACE Act is useful for physical interference with access to clinics, it’s not a particularly helpful statute when it comes to a law like this,” said Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. “It does no good to protect the entrance to a clinic that has been forced to shut down by the threat posed by this law.”

The Justice Department sued Texas on Thursday over its recently enacted law that prohibits nearly all abortions in the state, the first significant step by the Biden administration to fight the nation’s most restrictive ban on abortion and a move that could once again put the statute before the Supreme Court. ... It is not a foregone conclusion that the Supreme Court would again allow the Texas law to stand, said Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard Law professor and leading liberal constitutional scholar. “The complaint reaches beyond Roe v. Wade to encompass a structural attack on the basic design of the extraordinary Texas law,” Mr. Tribe said. The law’s structure, he argued, is an end run around seminal cases like Marbury v. Madison in 1803, which established the Supreme Court’s power to determine whether legislation and executive acts are consistent with the Constitution.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s vow to protect women’s right to choose abortion while officials explore challenging a Texas law that severely restricts the procedure offers more bark than bite, legal analysts say, with abortion rights proponents pressing for more aggressive steps. ... Laurence H. Tribe, an emeritus Harvard Law School professor and constitutional law expert, said Garland’s emphasis on the use of the Face Act seemed “quite irrelevant.” “I did not think that was a particularly helpful thing for him to announce. The threats to the women who seek abortions in Texas are not physical threats to them or the property of the clinics,” Tribe said. “They are threatened with bankruptcy. It’s ironic that the Face Act would be helpful if someone were to knock the door down, but not if they were to bring the whole house down.”

Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional Law, emeritus, at Harvard Law School, talks with Rachel Maddow about past Supreme Court decisions that Attorney General Merrick Garland could cite in a challenge to the new Texas abortion ban.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe and David Rosenberg: The Supreme Court’s Whole Woman’s Health decision not to block the Texas post-six-week abortion ban has caused terrified abortion providers to shut down despite the ban’s flagrant violation of Roe v. Wade. A particularly chilling aspect of the Texas law empowers any civilian anywhere to sue Texans who aid in an abortion and to collect a bounty of at least $10,000 if they win in court. To respond to the ban’s violation, Attorney General Merrick Garland should treat bounty hunting under SB-8 as a criminal deprivation of civil rights, leading to possible federal prosecutions under two sections of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. That law was passed to protect the civil rights of previously enslaved Americans who were targeted for extrajudicial violence by white supremacist vigilantes.

For nearly half a century, Americans have lived in a country in which safe, legal abortions were generally accessible to those needing them. The constitutional protection established in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was firm and secure. That fact, paradoxically, worked to the political advantage of activists who reject abortion rights. ... But the new Texas abortion law should dispel any illusions about their real, and immoderate, purpose. What they want is to deprive all women of the liberty to decide whether to carry pregnancies to term. They favor a regime of compulsory motherhood from which there is no escape. ... You may assume the effects will be confined to the Lone Star State. Women with money may figure they can always drive to New Mexico or fly to Chicago to terminate a pregnancy. But as Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told me, the law has an unlimited reach.

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe: The Texas legislature and five Supreme Court justices have joined forces to eviscerate women’s abortion rights — the legislature by creating and the justices by leaving in place a system of private bounties designed to intimidate all who would help women exercise the right to choose. But the federal government has — and should use — its own powers, including criminal prosecution, to prevent the law from being enforced and to reduce its chilling effects. Of course, the best approach would be for Congress to codify the right to abortion in federal law, although Democrats likely lack the votes to make that happen — and there is a risk that this conservative Supreme Court would find that such a statute exceeded Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause.

A public university official in Massachusetts has been turning down all requests from Catholic students for a religious exemption from the school’s coronavirus vaccine requirement, based on his research into Catholic teachings. ...Laurence Tribe, a retired Harvard Law School professor who has frequently argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, said he believes UMass Boston “has clearly violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” Tribe said the government is within its rights to make no exceptions for religion when it comes to rules governing health and safety — but that once it allows for religious exemptions to a rule, the government can’t be the decider on what the religion teaches. “It’s one thing to say that our general rules allow no religious exceptions and quite another to say, ‘If the Catholic faith truly taught what you say it does, then you’d be fine,’” Tribe said. “That’s a government official interpreting a religion. That’s clearly unconstitutional and deeply offensive.”

Lawrence O'Donnell talks to Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe about the Texas anti-abortion bill that the Supreme Court refused to block.. ..."Well, it is truly stunning. ... But as Justice Sotomayor said, it simply cannot be the case. Although, five justices say they think it is. It cannot be the case that the state can pass a flagrantly unconstitutional law, unconstitutional unless and until Roe v. Wade is formally overturned, and then avoid any judicial review by deputizing strangers, total strangers. And they don`t have to be Texans. They can be from California. They can be from France. The law clearly allows anyone on the Planet Earth to come into Texas court during, as you say, that four-year period after an abortion and get $10,000 from anyone, friend, a neighbor, the ex-lover, the Uber driver, the person who funded the abortion, anybody who was involved in the abortion, unless somehow the evidence is accumulated that there was no heartbeat. That is not only stunning, it is abominable. It`s breathtaking."

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: For years, as the supreme court’s composition kept tilting right, reproductive rights have been squarely on the chopping block. Now they are on the auction block as well. Observers have speculated how today’s new ultra-right court would commence the slicing: by chipping away slowly at Roe v Wade? Or by taking the political heat and overruling it outright? Few imagined that the court would let a statute everybody concedes is flagrantly unconstitutional under the legal regime of Roe not only go into effect without being judicially reviewed but become the centerpiece of a totally unique state scheme that puts a bounty of at least $10,000 on the head of every woman who is or might be pregnant.

A Texas law that bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy took effect at midnight on Wednesday after the Supreme Court failed to act on emergency requests from abortion providers. ... “The Constitution, including Roe v. Wade, only applies against the government, it doesn’t apply against private individuals,” says Laurence Tribe, a leading constitutional law expert at Harvard. “That’s what makes this really dangerous. It’s a kind of vigilante justice, circumventing all of the mechanisms we have for making sure that the law is enforced fairly, and that it’s not enforced in a way that violates people’s rights.”