Laurence Tribe

The margin of the ruling and the author of the opinion were as stunning as the result. On Monday, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote in a 6-3 ruling (joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer) that the ban on sex-based discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity...The decision quite closely adheres to an amicus brief filed by constitutional scholars Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz submitted on behalf of several former solicitors general, including Ted Olson and Seth Waxman, and former acting solicitors general Walter Dellinger and Neal Katyal. Tribe tells me that “the decision is a rare shining moment in the midst of all too much darkness," pointing out the concrete impact on millions of Americans and marking “the first victory ever for transgender rights at the Supreme Court — as well as the first clear recognition that discriminating against individuals because of their sexual orientation constitutes sex discrimination pure and simple even if those who wrote the relevant statutes might not have anticipated that reading.” There are several main takeaways. First, Gorsuch’s opinion should remind Republicans that a true textualist who gives an honest reading of a statute or the provision of the Constitution at hand is not simply a vessel for evangelical Christians and other right-wingers to impose their views on a pluralistic society. As Tribe puts it, the decision shows that “applying legal texts in accord with their meaning can sometimes triumph over efforts to read the minds of the authors and that at least some Justices, including Justice Gorsuch, are consistent in their textualism even if others, including it seems Justices [Brett M.] Kavanaugh and [Samuel A.] Alito [Jr.] and [Clarence] Thomas, are not.”

More than 100 liberal activists, leaders and celebrities signed a letter urging Joe Biden to select Sen. Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, intensifying pressure on the presumptive Democratic nominee from the left as he faces competing demands to pick a black woman. The letter portrays Warren (D-Mass.) as the best prepared prospect to serve as president and one uniquely capable of helping Biden politically in the November election. It asserts that he is “already strong” among nonwhite voters but could use help winning over disaffected voters who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the primary — even as some of them have soured on Warren...The letter, sent to Biden’s campaign on Friday, underlines the dueling pressures the former vice president is facing as he weighs his choices. While many on the left favor Warren, the nationwide protests over racism and police violence have prompted growing calls for Biden to choose an African American woman. This has added a challenge for white candidates such as Warren, who lack deep ties to African American communities, some Biden allies believe. As a candidate for president, Warren attracted mostly white crowds to her events and struggled to break through with black voters. Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, where Warren once taught, said that there would be some “symbolic ways in which some people would be disappointed” if Biden does not choose an African American woman, and that disappointment should count. But Warren’s record, he said, makes her the strongest choice. “I think African Americans above all would be the first to say they are more interested in results than cosmetics,” said Tribe, who signed the letter.

Judge Emmet Sullivan’s appointed amicus curiae issued a stinging rebuke of retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in a brief filed Wednesday. “[T]he Court should deny leave because there is clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power,” retired judge and former prosecutor John Gleeson wrote in his 82-page filing–directly addressing the extraordinary intervention of Attorney General Bill Barr in the case. In early May, the DOJ head directed his subordinates to ask the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia to dismiss charges of lying to federal agents against the president’s one-time national security advisor. Judge Sullivan, who has overseen Flynn’s case for years and who has been critical of the defendant in the past, took umbrage at the request and asked for any interested parties to intervene in the case in order to assess the merits of such a dismissal. Gleeson, known for his perspicacity viz. federal standards, was hand-selected by Sullivan for his analysis on May 13...Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe was also firmly on board with the retired judge’s thorough trashing of the DOJ’s position. “The amicus brief on behalf of Judge Gleeson is genuinely spectacular,” he said in an email. “It is thorough, careful, precise, candid, utterly devastating as a legal matter, and not in the least bit overstated. No judge who rules against the position articulated in this brief can possibly retain the respect of his or her peers.”

Activists who were outraged by George Floyd's death welcomed the criminal charges against Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers who were involved in that horrifying incident. But some of those charges raise issues that would trouble many of the same criminal justice reformers if the context were different. The second-degree manslaughter charge against Chauvin, the officer who kneeled on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes, seems to easily fits the facts of the case. It alleges that Chauvin caused Floyd's death "by his culpable negligence, creating an unreasonable risk and consciously [taking] the chances of causing great bodily harm to another." That offense carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison...Chauvin also faces a third-degree murder charge, which alleges that he caused Floyd's death by "perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life." That charge, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe and Minnesota criminal defense attorney Albert Turner Goins have argued, is not appropriate in this case, because Minnesota courts have restricted it to "reckless or wanton acts" committed "without special regard to their effect on any particular person."

Like the cavalry riding over the hill to save the day, guardians of justice are rushing forth to support the sanctity of the rule of law and due process from the maundering authoritarians in the Trump administration. For nearly four years, the Justice Department has been deformed and corrupted, becoming the unbridled defender of President Trump’s personal interests...Also on Wednesday, retired New York federal judge John Gleeson filed his amicus brief at the invitation of U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on whether to accept the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss the charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn — for which Flynn had already pleaded guilty — concerning his lies to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 transition...Gleeson’s brief receives widespread praise from legal experts. “It is thorough, careful, precise, candid, utterly devastating as a legal matter, and not in the least bit overstated,” constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe tells me. “No judge who rules against the position articulated in this brief can possibly retain the respect of his or her peers.” Tribe continues, “As this amicus brief meticulously demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt, a decision in favor of DOJ in this case would have to be ‘based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump.’ I cannot recall reading a more compelling or more obviously irrefutable legal submission in years.” Finally, Tribe adds, “If I had been a lawyer on the other side of this matter, I’d be thoroughly ashamed of myself.”

An article by Joshua A. Geltzer, Neal K. Katyal, Jennifer Taub and Laurence H. Tribe: The Trump administration’s authoritarian behavior on the streets is being matched by its authoritarian positions in the federal courts. On Monday, as the administration used military force to push peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, administration lawyers filed an astonishing brief in the federal appeals court down the street, urging the court to order the trial judge to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn. The brief represents a remarkable new position by the Trump Justice Department: The doors of federal courthouses should be closed to hearing arguments other than those advanced by the department itself, and federal judges may not even inquire into whether the administration has acted improperly. When the Justice Department moved abruptly to drop the Flynn case — after he pleaded guilty (twice) and as he was awaiting sentencing — U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan took two steps. He appointed a “friend of the court” to argue the position that the Justice Department had suddenly abandoned; and he called a hearing to scrutinize the department’s about-face. The Justice Department told the appeals court that it should take the extraordinary step of intervening in the case — before Sullivan has ruled or even held a hearing — to stop him from doing so. “Simply put, the district court has no authority to reject the Executive’s conclusion,” the department said.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison today announced new criminal charges against the four former Minneapolis police officers who were involved in the May 25 death of George Floyd, an incident that set off protests across the country. Ellison upgraded an earlier charge against Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes while arresting him for passing a counterfeit $20 bill, and for the first time charged three other officers who were also at the scene, two of whom helped pin Floyd to the pavement. Local prosecutors previously charged Chauvin with third-degree murder, which is punishable by up to 25 years in prison, and second-degree manslaughter, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years. Ellison changed the first charge to second-degree murder, increasing the maximum sentence to 40 years...Ellison apparently agreed with Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe and Minnesota criminal attorney Albert Turner Goins, who argued that the third-degree murder charge against Chauvin was inappropriate. Minnesota law defines that offense as causing someone's death by "perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life." Tribe and Goins noted that state courts have interpreted the statute as limiting the charge to "reckless or wanton acts…without special regard to their effect on any particular person." Instead they recommended the sort of second-degree murder charge that Ellison has now filed.

President Trump on Monday vowed to send the military into American cities if any city or state “refuses” to take the steps necessary to quell the violent protests erupting around the country. The Insurrection Act of 1807 does give the president broad authority to deploy federal military forces to a state or to federalize a state’s national guard to deal with a rebellion or other domestic unrest that is preventing the enforcement of federal law — even over the objection of the state’s governor, legal scholars say. But governors and Democratic attorneys general around the country were quick to declare that the law does not apply to the current unrest, which has involved peaceful protests as well as looting and violence. They say that local law enforcement has not been overwhelmed...Some scholars agree with Healey that the Insurrection Act cannot be used in the current situation — but they don’t necessarily think that will stop Trump from using the law. Unlike in the school desegregation battles of the 1950s and 1960s, the states do not appear to be flouting federal law or federal court orders. “I would say that’s an unconstitutional use of the military because there is no real rebellion against the US,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. Treating ordinary American citizens engaged in civil protest as insurrectionists “turns the law upside down,” he said.

A much-anticipated explanation from the federal judge presiding over Michael Flynn’s criminal case was submitted on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit previously ordered U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan to explain, within 10 days, why he didn’t immediately grant the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case. That order came down after Flynn’s lawyers filed an emergency petition for a writ of mandamus with the D.C. Circuit, asking the appellate court to direct Sullivan to dismiss the case...Amici curiae in former independent counsel Ken Starr and former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy weighed in and backed the DOJ; George Conway, Laurence Tribe, Watergate prosecutors and others took the opposite stance, arguing that Sullivan was acting within his authority when appointing retired federal judge John Gleeson to present the arguments against the DOJ. Sullivan also ordered Gleeson to examine whether Flynn should be held criminal contempt of court for perjuring himself over the course of his prosecution.

An article by Laurence Tribe and Albert Turner Goins: Unless prosecutors in Minnesota file more serious charges against the police officer accused of killing George Floyd, they’re at risk of compounding public outrage by letting that former officer escape a charge of murder. Millions of us watched the Memorial Day video of the white officer, Derek Chauvin, grinding his knee into the neck of Floyd, an immobilized Black man. We saw Floyd call out for his mother and say, “I can’t breathe,” until he was beyond saving. The echoes of past extrajudicial executions and centuries of slavery and slaughter, of lynching and officially sanctioned violence, rang out across the land. It took several excruciating days before the county’s chief prosecutor, Michael Freeman, finally saw fit to file criminal charges against Chauvin, and then only for second-degree manslaughter, an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison but usually resulting in a much lighter sentence, as well as something Minnesota calls third-degree murder, a crime punishable by up to 25 years but applicable only where someone unintentionally causes death by “reckless or wanton acts … without special regard to their effect on any particular person” — like shooting aimlessly into a crowd. No one remotely familiar with Minnesota law would regard either of those charges as the right ones to bring in this case — a case where, even if intent cannot be proven, a second-degree felony murder charge, punishable by 40 years in prison, is manifestly justified. Under a quirk in Minnesota law, second-degree murder can be charged where an assault — such as the first-degree assault evident from Chauvin’s placement of his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes — unintentionally results in death. More critically, anyone steeped in Minnesota law would recognize that the third-degree murder charge would likely be summarily dismissed for the ironic reason that Chauvin clearly aimed his acts at Floyd. Such a miscarriage of justice would surely trigger still more chaos and violence from coast to coast as people across the political spectrum come to see American justice as unworthy of the name.

When it comes to President Trump signing an executive order attempting to punish social media companies, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe says the president is ‘creating a problem where there really was none.’

There is no freedom more important than the right to free speech. So why aren't more conservatives speaking out now that President Donald Trump has issued his most serious threat in recent memory to our collective First Amendment rights? On Wednesday the president threatened Twitter, a social media platform that he has used for half a decade to advance his political cause, after it included a fact-check label on one of his tweets. First things first: Twitter was indisputably correct in saying that Trump had uttered a falsehood when he claimed mail-in ballots are fraudulent...Yet even if Twitter had been factually wrong, it is still a private company that has the right under the First Amendment to criticize our government and its leaders without fear of reprisal or censorship. It is Trump's job as president to protect those rights even — no, especially — when they are used by those who oppose him... "The threat by Donald Trump to shut down social media platforms that he finds objectionable is a dangerous overreaction by a thin-skinned president. Any such move would be blatantly unconstitutional under the First Amendment," Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email. "That doesn't make the threat harmless, however, because the president has many ways in which he can hurt individual companies, and his threat to do so as a way of silencing dissent is likely to chill freedom of expression and will undermine constitutional democracy in the long run."

An article by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Geltzer: On Tuesday, President Trump claimed — on Twitter, no less — that Twitter is “stifling FREE SPEECH,” thus suggesting that Twitter is violating the First Amendment. As usual, Trump is wrong on the law, but this time he’s even more wrong than usual. There is someone violating the First Amendment on Twitter, but it’s not Twitter — it’s Trump. What’s more, his threat on Wednesday to shut down Twitter altogether would mean violating the First Amendment in new ways. Trump is utterly mistaken in claiming that Twitter is violating the First Amendment — or even that Twitter can violate the First Amendment. Prompting Trump’s outburst was the platform’s first-ever attachment of warnings to two of Trump’s tweets encouraging users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots.” Clicking the warning leads to a news story indicating that “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.” Attaching these warnings, Trump claimed, was Twitter’s First Amendment sin. But it’s no constitutional violation. To begin with, the First Amendment applies to the government — not to private actors like Twitter. So, when the company adds warnings to tweets or even — going a step further for users other than Trump — removes tweets, it can’t possibly violate the First Amendment, because it simply isn’t a governmental entity. You can love or hate how Twitter is regulating its own private platform — but you can’t call it a First Amendment violation.

State and federal governments can't force people to receive a new coronavirus vaccine against their will, experts said, but lawmakers may be able to create a mandate that imposes consequences for not being vaccinated. Vaccine research for a new coronavirus is moving forward at an unprecedented rate and experts champion high rates of immunity in a population as a solution to stopping a virus from spreading. But a recent Reuters poll found about a quarter of the American public isn't interested in a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, and the federal government may have a tough time creating a requirement that people be inoculated. It's possible Congress could have the power to mandate a vaccine under the commerce clause since the virus travels across state borders, constitutional law experts told Newsweek...The federal government could also leave the decision up to states. In the 1905 case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a citizen argued forced smallpox inoculations infringed on his personal liberty. The Supreme Court upheld the Cambridge Board of Health's authority to require the vaccination under the 10th Amendment that grants state police powers. As it's still a "perfectly good law," Laurence Tribe, a Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School told Newsweek. The answer to whether states could mandate vaccinations, he said, was a "clear yes."

A coalition of 20 elite legal scholars on Friday submitted a legal brief imploring the federal judge overseeing the prosecution of retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn to deny the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against the former National Security Advisor. According to the brief, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan is under no obligation to mechanically grant the DOJ’s controversial motion. There is no valid reason the court should be prevented from imposing a lawful sentence against a defendant who has twice pleaded guilty to committing a federal crime, the lawyers argued. Led by Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, the group also included Berkeley Law legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, Cornell Law’s Michael Dorf, Chicago University’s David Strauss, and Trump nemesis/attorney and Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway...Rather than dismissing the case, Sullivan controversially appointed retired federal judge John Gleeson as amicus curiae to present arguments as to why Flynn shouldn’t be held in criminal contempt. Sullivan has also given non-court-appointed amici curiae (such as Conway, Tribe, et al. and Watergate prosecutors) an opportunity to weigh in.

An appeals court Thursday ordered the judge in Michael Flynn’s case to defend his actions after Flynn’s attorneys asked that his conviction be dismissed immediately, as requested by the Justice Department. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit took the unusual step of ordering U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to answer within 10 days accusations from Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser. The court also invited the Justice Department to comment. The order comes as legal scholars from across the political spectrum debated the case’s implications for judicial independence and the Constitution’s separation-of-powers design. “This case does not involve a decision by the Executive Branch simply to ‘drop’ a prosecution,” but a “virtually unprecedented decision” to dismiss a case after it has been won, wrote a group of about 20 legal experts, led by Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe, in a brief to be filed Friday...Tribe said his group will request to file a friend-of-the-court brief, saying the circuit panel’s order “makes it all the more urgent” and that the panel should deny Flynn’s request because granting it would be “a remarkable abuse of judicial authority.” Tribe’s co-signers include constitutional law scholars, the former law school deans of Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago, and the president of Columbia University. Republican signers include George T. Conway III, the conservative lawyer and husband of the president’s White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway; Trevor Potter, former Federal Election Commission chairman; and Richard Painter, George W. Bush’s former chief White House ethics lawyer.

An article by Laurence Tribe: Heraclitus famously said that a man's character is his fate. So too with a presidency. A president's character is inextricably linked to his administration's fate. And one of this president's most characteristic personal failings has begun to manifest itself in his administration's legal arguments. I refer to President Donald Trump's pathological reliance on "I'm rubber, you're glue" thinking—psychiatric professionals call it "projection"—to deflect attacks against him back onto his critics. This president accuses all his adversaries, real and imagined, of the very malignancies of which he is guilty. He did it with the presidential debates, quickly and childishly turning Secretary Hillary Clinton's accusation that he was a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin back onto her ("No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!"). He did it with race, accusing the four Democratic congresswomen who called out his racism of themselves being racist. And he did it with impeachment, railing for the impeachment of, among others, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Chairman Adam Schiff and Senator Mitt Romney. Trump and his apologists are back at it again with Michael Flynn. They're offering the same "I'm rubber, you're glue" reasoning, this time covered in the thin veneer of legal argument. They accuse U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who presided over the Flynn trial and is poised to sentence Flynn for his federal crimes, of violating our constitutional separation of powers, for doing no more than taking entirely lawful and well-precedented steps to preserve the operations of the judicial branch. But in the end, it is Trump and Attorney General William Barr who are violating the separation of powers by taking lawless and unprecedented steps to undermine the judicial process.

President Trump’s decision not to divest himself of his businesses, in particular his foreign holdings or holdings that derive income from foreign governments, was a fateful error that flew in the face of precedent, clean government and the Constitution. Now, a federal appeals court has held he cannot derive income from foreign governments that frequent his businesses. The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, sitting en banc on Thursday, overruled a decision from a panel on the same court that prevented a case brought by Maryland and the District of Columbia from proceeding...In any event, “The decision of the full federal circuit court for the 4h Circuit is an important landmark on the long road to enforcing the Constitution’s emoluments clauses — its core protections against the corrupt commingling of personal financial ventures with public service at the highest levels of our government — against the president who has violated those clauses in a more blatant and dangerous way than any other chief executive in our nation’s history,” says constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. He observes, “We can’t realistically expect a decision by that court until after the current Trump term is over, however, and if Trump is voted out of office this November and becomes a private citizen next January, it’s conceivable that the case will become moot.” If moot, “What Judge Diana Motz wrote for the 4th Circuit majority in this major case might well stand as the last authoritative word on the meaning and importance of the emoluments clauses, which future presidents will hopefully heed in a way this president never has.”

On Monday, John Gleeson, a retired U.S. district judge for the Eastern District of New York and former chief of the Criminal Division in that U.S. Attorney’s Office, wrote an op-ed in the pages of The Post with two other former Justice Department officials to object to Attorney General William P. Barr’s move to dismiss the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn despite Flynn’s guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI and despite the court’s previous ruling that the lies were “material.” ...Several points stand out in this highly unusual case. First, Sullivan is signaling to the Justice Department (especially to career lawyers) that he is not going to let it off the hook when it does President Trump’s bidding...Second, Barr’s attempt to dismiss the case is not a slam dunk. Far from it...Third, Gleeson is a wise pick, which means trouble for the Justice Department lawyers. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe — who said, “Retired U.S. District Court Judge John Gleeson is a strong choice for the task assigned to him by Judge [Emmet] Sullivan” — and multiple former prosecutors with whom I spoke attest to Gleeson’s skills as a prosecutor and his integrity. His interest here is in preventing the sort of perversion of the courts that Barr cavalierly undertakes in service to Trump, whom Barr wrongly believes is his client. (The American people are his client.)

At a time when his political power is slipping away, President Trump now looks to the courts to bolster his extreme theory of executive branch supremacy. In doing so, he risks precedent-setting rebukes from federal courts. In the first instance, Trump’s attorney general, sparing Trump the trouble of a pardon, seeks to dismiss the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn — after Flynn has pleaded guilty. This disdain for impartial justice tests the limits of federal courts’ patience with Trump’s attempts to run roughshod over an equal branch of government. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told me that “it’s not just a minor point that the court has already determined that the guilty pleas were well founded and has accepted Flynn’s waiver of any right to appeal the conviction those pleas supported.” He argued that not only could U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan reject the attempt to short-circuit the judicial process but that he has to do so. “Notably, [Attorney General] William Barr isn’t arguing that there’s dispositive newly discovered evidence that was unavailable when the court made its determination to accept Flynn’s pleas of guilty,” he pointed out. Instead, “In the guise of appealing to the court’s discretion, Barr is asking the court to treat its earlier adjudication as merely advisory and to give effect to the decision by the executive branch that the advice should be rejected.”

An article by Laurence Tribe: US District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan unquestionably knows that when a federal defendant pleads guilty but then asks to be relieved of his fate, it is up to the court to decide the merit of his argument — no matter who supports it, including a prosecutor who has switched sides. Sullivan is presiding over the case in which former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty twice to serious federal crimes and is ready for sentencing. The fly in the ointment is a recent request by Attorney General William Barr that basically says: Never mind. Ignore those guilty pleas; Flynn never should’ve been interviewed about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the first place, so his admitted lies to the FBI don’t matter. The whole “Russia thing” was a hoax, according to Barr, that we’re now helping President Trump erase from history. Anyone studying the facts would have no doubt this was his message. The emerging consensus, reflected in these pages and in recent columns, is that Barr’s motion to dismiss the Flynn prosecution, however transparently abusive, leaves Sullivan in a pickle. As Jeffrey Toobin put it, “there doesn’t appear to be any way for a judge to force prosecutors to bring a case that they want to drop.” The judge’s options are said to include: examining why the prosecutor in charge of the case for the past several years suddenly withdrew; inquiring whether the Department of Justice’s reasons for treating the entire prosecution as unlawful and the guilty pleas as void were legally sound; granting the request to drop all charges but doing so “without prejudice” so they might be refiled by a future Justice Department; and proceeding to sentence Flynn in a rare and courageous exercise of discretion under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.