Laurence Tribe

The government can't force a person to be vaccinated, but it's likely within its power to require proof of a COVID-19 vaccine to engage in certain activities, including attending events. "Vaccine passports," a means of proving a person's vaccination status, have been floated as a way of increasing capacity at certain events as America crawls toward normalcy...Congress could potentially have the power to mandate vaccines under the commerce clause, experts told Newsweek and states could institute mandates under the 10th Amendment. However, a mandate can't force someone to be vaccinated against their will, it can only impose restrictions on a non-vaccinated person. Those who aren't vaccinated could be prevented from engaging in interstate travel, Laurence Tribe, a Carl M. Loeb University professor at Harvard Law School, told Newsweek, and entering places where social distancing and mask-wearing wouldn't be sufficient in preventing virus transmission. "Private businesses could require proof of vaccination by those seeking entry unless prohibited from doing so by state or local law," Tribe said.

Today, the most important piece of testimony Chief Arradondo delivered was that Derek Chauvin should have taken his knee off of George Floyd’s neck after the first few seconds. The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has ruled that Senate Democrats can pass two more bills this year with a simple majority vote, paving the way for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan to pass with 51 votes, bypassing the 60- vote procedural threshold for most legislation in the Senate now. Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio is interviewed. In an op-ed for the right wing newspaper "The Washington Examiner", Congressman Matt Gaetz said quote, "I am absolutely not resigning". Donald Trump lied about campaign fundraising from the beginning to the end of his political career. Guests: Kirk Burkhalter, Marq Claxton, Tim Ryan, Laurence Tribe, Tim O’Brien.

The pandemic has brought grinding frustrations for parents, educators and students across the country. But perhaps no place has matched San Francisco in its level of infighting, public outrage and halting efforts to reopen schools...Critics of San Francisco’s brand of liberal politics have long pointed to a disconnect between elected officials’ lofty rhetoric about social justice, and the reality of a city where fabulous wealth lives side by side with extreme poverty and despair, exemplified by the homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness on the city’s streets...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and an alumnus of the San Francisco public school system, said the board had used “cultural distractions” as a way of covering up its inability to get schools reopened. “It’s clear,” he said, “that the internecine conflict among relatively privileged liberals sometimes leaves behind people that they genuinely believe they are concerned about.”

A judge has sided with opponents of the renaming of 44 San Francisco schools in a lawsuit that has drawn Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe to help represent them. San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Ethan P. Schulman, in a Thursday decision, ordered the school board to rescind its resolution ordering 44 city schools renamed. The school board vote in January said the schools, named after historical figures or locations, have connections to slavery, racism or oppression...Tribe, who attended Lincoln High School, said the resolution has the effect of “branding alumni of schools as racist” and said it was “absurd” to brand President Abraham Lincoln as a racist. “To say Abraham Lincoln, we will just revile him from now on, is just bogus,” Tribe added in a phone interview Friday. The board’s action not only violates the state Brown Act but also the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, he said. Tribe conceded the claim was “an unusual application of the Brown Act” and said the resolution would have been “silly but not illegal” if adequate notice had been given.

Constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe said on MSNBC Sunday that evidence appears to support sedition charges against former President Donald Trump regarding his role in the Capitol riot. While various financial cases against Trump are very strong, the Harvard University law professor said they won’t hold him accountable for the abuses he allegedly committed as president. However, far more serious for Trump was the Fulton County investigation into his efforts to overturn Georgia’s vote for Joe Biden for president in the 2020 election. If Trump is convicted of “conspiracy to commit sedition — which is a fancy way of talking about trying to prevent the government from functioning,” — Trump could get 20 years in prison, Tribe said. A conviction on another charge, which applies to “anyone who gives aid or comfort to insurrection or rebellion,” would be punishable by up to 10 years and permanent disqualification from ever holding any state or federal office. It’s that second charge where the evidence “seems to point to the president’s guilt” concerning the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, Tribe said.

The San Francisco school board is on the ropes after a judge ordered it to vacate a resolution scrubbing 44 public schools of their historical namesakes, or explain why it should not be compelled to do so. It’s uncommon for a judge to rule so quickly, as public school alumni groups and the San Francisco Taxpayers Association just filed their petition seeking the decision’s repeal on the grounds that it was done without due process. In an interview Friday, attorney and constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe said the order from Judge Ethan Schulman bolstered his conviction that the petitioners he represents have a strong case that the school board’s renaming process was unlawful. “It vindicated my sense that this is an extremely strong and unambiguously correct case,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to become involved, because I thought the issues were so important.” ... “The whole process was poisoned from the beginning,” Tribe said. A Harvard Law School professor emeritus who has argued innumerable cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Tribe said this case piqued his interest for several reasons. “One of them is I’m very interested in the issue of how to achieve racial justice in a world where all sorts of things have been named after racists and Confederate soldiers, and much of that renaming happened not at the time of the Civil War, but as part of the opposition to racial progress in the 1960s,” he said. “So I’m not one of those people who say you should never take down a Robert E. Lee statue.” The issue is also personal for Tribe, a San Francisco native who graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Can an American president be held accountable to those he kills or injures in an effort to hold onto power? That question is far from hypothetical. As president, Donald Trump orchestrated the “Big Lie” that his electoral defeat was fraudulent, and then exploited the beliefs of many of his supporters in that lie to foment a deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. It’s increasingly possible that the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., will criminally prosecute Trump for strong-armingGeorgia’s secretary of state to steal the election for him, and that the Department of Justice may pursue his potential violations of Civil War-era federal statutes criminalizing seditious conspiracies, insurrection and rebellion. But the politics of prosecuting a former president are enormously complex. Many will urge turning the page to avoid the appearance of a banana republic, where ousted leaders are routinely jailed by their successors. Even successful criminal prosecution, however, would fail to compensate the myriad victims of Jan. 6. That’s where civil lawsuits, and their promise of compensatory and punitive damages, come into focus. But as plaintiffs begin to line up, many worry that this promise may ring hollow in light of the considerable obstacles to litigation, particularly against former presidents.

Constitutional law Professor Laurence Tribe joins Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the civil lawsuit filed by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) against Donald Trump for the former president’s involvement in the Capitol invasion. Prof. Tribe says the lawsuit is “quite invulnerable to any legal challenge” and an “important way for accountability to take place.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The 2020 election revealed rot in this country’s institutions. Donald Trump degraded the presidency; senators like Josh Hawley(R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) degraded the Congress. And, in a direct shot at the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as our 46thpresident, Justice Clarence Thomas made clear that the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election — a major source of institutional decay — has infected the Supreme Court, too. Thomas staked out his Trumpian position in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s dismissal of two election-related lawsuits in Pennsylvania. Republicans in Pennsylvania had asked the Supreme Court to answer a recurring question that plagued the 2020 election: Does the United States Constitution permit the members of a state legislature, acting as a gang of elected lawmakers unconstrained by the state’s own constitution, to seize control of a presidential election by naming their own slate of electors to replace those chosen by the votes of the state’s people? The answer to that crucial question depends in part on parsing Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes that presidential electors are appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature [of the State] may direct.” Some maintain that, by vesting the power to choose electors in state “Legislature[s],” the Constitution has designated a free-range bunch of state representatives to meet wherever they like and do whatever suits their fancy. They claim the Constitution authorized state legislatures to ignore procedural requirements (like the number of votes needed to pass a bill) drawn from the state’s constitution and even substantive state constitutional provisions (like those enshrining the right to fair and equal voting opportunities).

Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, says Judge Merrick Garland's would be "one of the greatest attorneys general in American history." Tribe spoke with CBSN's Anne-Marie Green and Vladimir Duthiers about why Garland is right for the job and what he can do to fight extremism and racism.

Federal investigators have signaled some of the defendants in the attack on the U.S. Capitol could be charged with seditious conspiracy, a law enacted to target those who attacked the federal government during the Reconstruction era. An indictment filed on Jan. 27 charges three of the riot suspects with conspiring to impede Congress' certification of the Electoral College vote for the 2020 presidential election...Many attorneys say it would be appropriate to charge some of the Capitol rioters with seditious conspiracy or with violating another federal law that criminalizes insurrection and rebellion against the United States. Those laws “seem tailor-made to cover the precise course of conduct engaged in by a number of the defendants who either have been or might still be charged in the attack on the Capitol,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School...Other court documents show that two suspects charged with conspiracy were seen that day with leaders of the Proud Boys, an extremist group with ties to white nationalism. Tribe said it is difficult for outsiders, even legal experts, to forecast the appropriate charges against riot suspects “without knowing the detailed evidence that a thorough Justice Department investigation is likely to uncover.”

Former president Donald Trump made the rounds of conservative media on Wednesday, declining to say whether he plans to run for president again. But in his return to the spotlight, Trump lacked one of his largest megaphones: Facebook (FB), where a decision about whether to reactivate his account sits with the company's oversight board. In a new interview, Laurence Tribe — one of the nation's top constitutional law scholars, who briefly served at the Justice Department during the Obama administration — assailed the purportedly independent oversight board as "a dangerous idea" and warned that allowing Trump back on the platform "would be a terrible mistake." But Tribe said the board may very well rule in favor of reactivating Trump's account, since welcoming back someone of his cultural prominence would reaffirm the platform as a central institution, akin to a government entity. "I wouldn't be surprised if they held that it was wrong to kick Trump off of Facebook," says Tribe, a professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University Law School who taught there for more than 50 years. "Because Facebook is sufficiently like the government as a public entity, that they really need to put Trump back."

While the coronavirus pandemic has infected millions and underscored the importance of quality health care, the Supreme Court has weighed a challenge to Obamacare that, if successful, would add 21 million to the ranks of the uninsured, according to a report released last October by the Urban Institute. The case drew renewed attention last week, when the Biden administration issued a letter in opposition to the Obamacare challenge, reversing the Trump administration's position on the case. In a new interview, Laurence Tribe — one of the nation's top constitutional law scholars, who briefly served at the Justice Department during the Obama administration — told Yahoo Finance that the case stands "no chance at all" of striking down the law, more formally known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He described the case against the law as "outlandish" and "extreme," assuring that even a conservative-majority court would keep Obamacare intact. "I don't think there is a chance at all that the law will be invalidated," says Tribe, a professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University Law School who taught there for more than 50 years. The Supreme Court will "get rid of the case," he adds. "Now that the Justice Department under Biden has reversed the position that the Trump administration took against the law."

On an all new episode of Influencers Andy sits down with Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Larry Tribe to discuss former President Trump's impeachment trial as well as the legal issues facing big tech companies in 2021.

House Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) — the chair of the Committee on Homeland Security — filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing former President Donald Trump of conspiring to incite the deadly attack on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol. The filing marks the latest in a slew of lawsuits and probes that center on a range of allegations, including efforts to influence election officials in Georgia, defame women who accused him of sexual assault, and manipulate the value of his assets for tax and loan purposes. In a new interview, Laurence Tribe — one of the nation's top constitutional law scholars, who briefly served at the Justice Department during the Obama administration — told Yahoo Finance that Trump faces a "a huge number of lawsuits" that will occupy his attention for the remainder of his life. It remains unclear whether Trump will end up serving time in prison, Tribe says, predicting that no matter the outcome of litigation Trump will "gradually fade away," in part due to the grueling demands of his legal defense. "He is fully subject to civil and criminal lawsuits both state and federal across the land," says Tribe, a professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University Law School who taught there for more than 50 years. "It's a panoply of charges," he adds. "So [Trump] is going to be busy defending himself from now until the end of his life."

In late December 2020, I concluded a fifty-page book chapter on the drafting of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment that began by declaring “Section 3 is the most forgotten provision of the forgotten Fourteenth Amendment.” Less prophetic words were never spoken...Section 3 applies to any person “who, having previously taken an oath … as an officer of the United States.” Does that clause apply to the Office of the President of the United States? During the controversy over the emoluments clause, Mr. Trump’s lawyers claimed that the president is not an officer of the United States and, therefore, not subject to the ban on accepting gifts from foreign governments. The overwhelming weight of scholarship and evidence is against this proposition. Norman Eisen, Richard Painter and Laurence Tribe point out, “[T]he text of the Constitution . . . repeatedly refers to the President as holding an “Office.”  For example, Article II, Section I provides that the President “shall hold his office during the term of four years.” It further provides that no person except a “natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to the office of President,” and addresses what occurs in the event of “the removal of the President from office.”

As recently as 10 years ago, Jeannie Suk Gersen was still telling people that the area of law she specialized in—sexual assault and domestic violence—didn’t hold much interest for the general public. A quiet corner of the profession, she thought. Remembering that now, she laughs. “But, you know,” she adds, “every area of law does end up moving into focus. Because, in the end, law is really about every aspect of our lives.” Which is partly why Gersen, J.D. ’02, has always taken it so seriously. “Words don’t just describe things,” she explains. In the law, “words actually do things.” ... “Jeannie is intellectually fearless,” says Bemis professor of international law Jonathan Zittrain. That’s a common sentiment among her colleagues... “There are a lot of people who are afraid to say things in our business,” says Learned Hand professor of law Jack Goldsmith, “and she’s not afraid to say what she thinks.” ... “Her whole response to Title IX has been very, very striking—and I think completely correct,” says Beneficial professor of law Charles Fried, who was Gersen’s teacher before he was her colleague ... Says her former teacher, Loeb University Professor emeritus Laurence Tribe, “I was always impressed by how both meticulous and yet unconventional her insights were. She would often come at issues in a kind of perpendicular way. Rather than finding a point between A and B, she would say that maybe that axis is the wrong axis.” ... “She has one of those amazing brains,” says Williams professor of law I. Glenn Cohen, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Gersen. “She was a year ahead of me in law school, and we all regarded her more like a faculty member, even back then. She just seemed to know everything.”

President Joe Biden is hoping to turn the page after the U.S. Senate acquittal of Donald Trump over the deadly storming of the Capitol building, even as Mr. Trump is vowing to stage a political comeback. Mr. Biden declared that the country would learn from the threat to its political system to ensure that such violence never happens again. He is hoping his administration and Congress can now focus on pandemic relief, immigration and his cabinet appointments...Whether Mr. Trump will face criminal charges is unclear. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe contended that, despite Mr. Trump’s acquittal, the trial had made a definitive statement about his unprecedented actions as president. “The impeachment permanently establishes a historical record of how this president was probably the most dangerous in American history,” said Prof. Tribe of Harvard Law School. “His astonishing and long-lasting campaign to overturn a fair election and hold onto power by whatever means possible distinguishes him from any other president.”

Donald Trump, who as president incited a riot in an effort to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election, was acquitted by the U.S. Senate on Saturday, putting an end to his second impeachment trial. He was not acquitted because he was innocent. He was acquitted for one reason: Donald Trump and his supporters have a toxic sense of entitlement, believing that they should never lose an election...Harvard Law colleague Laurence Tribe agreed that Trump's acquittal in the first impeachment trial paved the way for the misconduct that got him impeached a second time. "The first impeachment led almost inevitably to the second once Trump, whose whole modus operandi is built on lying, cheating, and stopping at nothing to secure power and fame was validated by the Senate's unfortunate acquittal the first time around," Tribe told Salon by email. "Having thought nothing of exposing the people of Ukraine to slaughter at the hands of Russia by threatening to withhold congressionally appropriated aid in an effort to pressure Ukraine's president Zelensky into injuring Biden by pretending to be investigating him and his son criminally, Trump upped the ante by threatening criminal prosecution of Georgia's Secretary of State Raffensperger in order to get Raffensperger to steal that state's electoral votes from Biden and, when that failed, by inciting insurrection by an armed and angry mob in a treasonous attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election."

Jamie Raskin had finished a face-to-face interview with the Guardian and was on his way home. It was late on Saturday night in October 2018. But then he thought of a point he hadn’t made and, ever fastidious, restarted the conversation by phone. “Straight white men are already a minority in the Democratic caucus but when the big blue wave hits, we’re going to be moving much closer to parity in terms of women and men, at least on the House side,” he said, a prediction that came true a month later in the midterm elections...Raskin graduated from Georgetown day school in 1979 then studied at Harvard and its law school, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and his teachers included Professor Laurence Tribe. Tribe recalls that Raskin and his wife, Sarah, met in his class on the constitution. “He is one of the most impressive students that I have ever come to know and is also an extremely impressive human being,” he said. “The courage that he has shown in the face of unthinkable personal tragedy has been something to behold. As the lead impeachment manager he couldn’t possibly have done a better job. I’ve taught quite a few impressive people, like President Obama and Chief Justice [John] Roberts and Justice [Elena] Kagan, and he is right at the top of the students that I feel very proud to have played at least some small role in educating.” Tribe remains in touch with Raskin, who told him he feels his late son is “with him” during this effort. “He is fully aware of the enormous historical import of this trial and the weight he carries on his shoulders and he’s carried it with grace,” Tribe said. “But for his awareness of that, I think he would be spending more time with his family because they’re still in mourning.”