Laurence Tribe

There's no disputing that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caused quite a stir when she tore up her copy of President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech at the end of his address. Pelosi said she decided to shred what she saw as a “compilation of falsehoods” to make a statement ”that clearly indicates to the American people that this is not the truth." Trump and his Republican allies, for their part, saw Pelosi's action as an act of disrespect — and an illegal one at that. Legal experts disagreed, saying the speech was Pelosi's to do with what she wanted...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Pelosi did not violate 18 U.S. Code Section 2071, the federal law defining the deliberate destruction of an official record that has been filed with a court or other government agency — a felony punishable by a prison term and by forfeiture of office.

A federal appeals court on Friday dismissed Democratic lawmakers' lawsuit against President Donald Trump alleging he has violated the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution on technical grounds. ...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor and constitutional expert, tweeted after the ruling, “Individual members of the House and Senate lack standing to sue Trump to stop his Foreign Emoluments Clause violations — but the House could sue for institutional injury. It should now do so.”

Since 1851, many remarkable black men and women did not receive obituaries in The New York Times. This month, with Overlooked, we’re adding their stories to our archives. When Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railway’s No. 8 train in New Orleans on June 7, 1892, he knew his journey to Covington, La., would be brief. He also knew it could have historic implications. ...“This case is infamous for several reasons,” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said in a telephone interview. “First, separate is almost never really equal. Second, separate is symbolically and psychologically unequal when it is recognized to have the social meaning that whites are too good to mix with blacks, or that one race is essentially superior to the other.”

Janet Wu joins the conversation as Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe talks about the impeachment and acquittal of the President, and its implications for the future (22:12)

One could hardly be surprised that self-identified pro-choice Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — who talked herself into supporting the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the grounds that the conservative jurist, picked off a list approved by right-to-lifers, would uphold Roe v. Wade (!) — would concoct some rationalization for voting to acquit President Trump in his impeachment trial. In spinning out an embarrassingly weak argument for her decision to side with her party, she confirmed Tuesday on the Senate floor that the notion of an independent-minded New England Republican is as dead as Vermonter Calvin Coolidge. ...“Many GOP Senators announcing their reasons for acquittal on the Senate floor today are relying on alleged process failures or on doubts that Trump did what the House alleges he did,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “That’s misguided and in many instances seems dishonest. But it’s not nearly as dangerous as relying on the wholly unfounded and genuinely crackpot theory that the offenses charged are just not impeachable — either because ‘abuse of power’ as such is an improperly framed ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’ or because the specific conduct alleged does not constitute the kind of abuse that is impeachable.”

Following the impeachment and acquittal of President Donald Trump after a bitter partisan battle, Americans now face a new reality that involves serious questions about the ability of the federal government to respect longheld balances of power. ... Now that the president has been acquitted, lawmakers may face a future in which their own decision amounts "to a license for any president to defy congressional oversight on a wholesale basis without any particularities, let alone legally plausible" explanation, long-time constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told Cheddar. "I don't think this is the end of American democracy or separation of powers. I don't think the rule of law is dead or democracy is permanently doomed," said Tribe, who teaches alongside defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School. "On the one hand, I have a deep faith that in the long run we will get past this, just as we got past the Civil War and WWII. On the other hand, I can't give you a path between here and the long run that could overcome the pessimism that says we have huge obstacles in the way."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) produced a great .gif of performative outrage for the #Resistance by ripping up a copy of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening after he rejected her “handshake of friendship.” ...Anti-Trump Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe put a bow on the pro-Trump misinformation campaign against Pelosi’s alleged kayfabe: "What a dumb idea! Not even Bill Barr would fall for that ludicrous misapplication of the federal law criminalizing mutilation of government records. The copy was the Speaker’s own, it wasn’t a government record to begin with, and her action was purely symbolic expression well within the protection of both the speech and debate clause and the first amendment."

Despite its rejection by more than 500 of the nation’s leading legal scholars and the star constitutional scholar who testified on behalf of House Republicans, several Republican senators said they are leaning heavily on arguments made by celebrity defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz for their votes to acquit President Trump on Wednesday. ...Even self-identified conservative scholars dispute the legal case Dershowitz made on the Senate floor. Larry Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law expert, called it a “crackpot theory.”

One could hardly be surprised that self-identified pro-choice Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — who talked herself into supporting the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on the grounds that the conservative jurist, picked off a list approved by right-to-lifers, would uphold Roe v. Wade (!) — would concoct some rationalization for voting to acquit President Trump in his impeachment trial... “Many GOP Senators announcing their reasons for acquittal on the Senate floor today are relying on alleged process failures or on doubts that Trump did what the House alleges he did,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “That’s misguided and in many instances seems dishonest. But it’s not nearly as dangerous as relying on the wholly unfounded and genuinely crackpot theory that the offenses charged are just not impeachable — either because ‘abuse of power’ as such is an improperly framed ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’ or because the specific conduct alleged does not constitute the kind of abuse that is impeachable.” He continues, “That’s demonstrably wrong, regardless of one’s approach to constitutional interpretation, whether textualist or originalist or evolutionary or functional or eclectic. No reputable constitutional scholar — not one — defends that theory or has defended it from the founding to the present.”

The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in the United States Senate will take a dramatic turn on Saturday as the president's lawyers preview their defence of the president. For three days, Democrats of the House of Representatives have unleashed a torrent of facts and legal logic, peppered with video clips and underpinned by slideshow presentations to show that Trump orchestrated an improper pressure campaign on Ukraine, covered it up and should be removed from office...Most constitutional scholars reject the executive privilege and immunity arguments Trump's lawyers have claimed so far and the issue is not likely to be resolved in the Republican-controlled Senate. "The president will do everything he can to silence Bolton. He will invoke executive privilege," said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. "Even if Bolton resists, Trump will try to go to court and there will be an issue whether it has jurisdiction or the Senate itself has to make a decision. There could be protracted litigation," Tribe told Al Jazeera.

When Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railway’s No. 8 train in New Orleans on June 7, 1892, he knew his journey to Covington, La., would be brief. He also knew it could have historic implications. Plessy was a racially mixed shoemaker who had agreed to take part in an act of civil disobedience orchestrated by a New Orleans civil rights organization. On that hot, sticky afternoon he walked into the Press Street Depot, purchased a first-class ticket and took a seat in the whites-only car. The civil rights group had chosen Plessy because he could pass for a white man. It was asserted later in a legal brief that he was seven-eighths white. But a conductor, who was also part of the scheme, stopped him and asked if he was “colored.” Plessy responded that he was. “Then you will have to retire to the colored car,” the conductor ordered. Plessy refused... “This case is infamous for several reasons,” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said in a telephone interview. “First, separate is almost never really equal. Second, separate is symbolically and psychologically unequal when it is recognized to have the social meaning that whites are too good to mix with blacks, or that one race is essentially superior to the other.” He added: “The ruling suggested that if people of color feel inferior as a result of these laws, it is their own fault. It is essentially part of blaming the victim and pretending that the feeling of subjugation and subordination is simply a problem in the mind of the person on the receiving end.”

Senator Rand Paul on Thursday stormed out of President Trump’s impeachment trial in anger after Chief Justice John Roberts declined to read a question he’d prepared because it would have named the CIA employee who prominent conservatives have accused of being the whistleblower whose complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General touched off the impeachment inquiry into the president. While the US Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause protects members of congress from any liability for official acts, Harvard Law School professor and constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe told BeltwayBreakfast that Paul’s decision to leave the Senate floor during trial proceedings could subject him to punishment and leave him without the immunity he would ordinarily enjoy. “I do think that he dropped the shield of the speech and debate clause when he did that for any number of reasons,” said Tribe, who has been advising House Democrats’ team of impeachment managers on constitutional questions.

Republicans hoping to end the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump and Democrats seeking to extend it with witnesses and documents may be looking to one man Friday: Chief Justice John Roberts. With Republicans increasingly confident they have the votes to block any additional testimony that could delay the trial and jeopardize Trump's likely acquittal, the mild-mannered jurist sitting as presiding officer has emerged as Democrats' last hope. ... But that interpretation of Senate rules is disputed by a range of experts, including Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. "The text refers only to orders 'authorized' by the rules or by the Senate, and that in turn begs the question whether such authorization exists," Tribe said. "The Senate parliamentarian seems to believe it doesn’t, and the chief is likely to defer to her."

Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe criticized the attempt made by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to name the alleged whistleblower who exposed the Ukraine scandal during President Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate as a "shameful gambit" of "dubious legality." "Rand Paul's effort to name the whistleblower in the Senate trial was disgraceful. Doing so would have been of dubious legality and of no utility," Tribe told Salon by email Thursday. "The speech and debate clause would have shielded Senator Paul from concrete adverse consequences, but the harm his shameful gambit could've done not just to the whistleblower but to the important public service that whistleblowers perform would've been incalculable."

The debate over impeachment from two of Harvard Law School’s most well-known faculty continued on Wednesday as senators asked questions during President Donald Trump’s trial. Harvard Law constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe has been publicly debating Trump defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who is a professor emeritus at the school.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe urged the GOP-controlled Senate to allow witnesses to testify in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump ― or risk setting a “terrible” precedent for the country. On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” Tribe argued the only way to hold a fair trial was for lawmakers to vote to hear from Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton “and other witnesses and the evidence.” Bolton reportedly confirms the Democrats’ case for impeachment in his forthcoming book “The Room Where It Happened,” in which he writes Trump tied military aid for Ukraine to its announcement of a probe into Joe Biden. Tribe described the defense argument being made by Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz as “remarkably absurd and extreme and dangerous.” “Namely, it doesn’t matter if a president uses the vast powers of his office to shake down an ally and help an adversary in order to get dirt on an enemy and corrupt an election,” he said, summarizing Dershowitz’s argument.

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe tells Lawrence O’Donnell that senators must vote for witnesses to ensure a fair trial, and that to acquit Trump on the Dershowitz defense would set a terrible precedent for future presidents and the country.

He’s the Harvard law professor advising Democrats on their impeachment playbook. There’s just one problem: His adventures in the extremely online world of the anti-Trump “Resistance” took him a little off the deep end for a while. Laurence Tribe has spent decades as a respected constitutional law scholar, but the Trump era saw him buddy up for a bit with the fringiest of fringey #Resistance conspiracists online in amplifying far-fetched theories about how President Trump and his crew might finally meet justice, some of which Tribe now regrets partaking in. And in another sign of the divisiveness of the Trump era, Tribe and his more MAGA-friendly Harvard Law colleague Alan Dershowitz—who is defending the president in his impeachment trial—have descended into a bitter feud, with Dershowitz accusing Tribe of harboring a “vendetta” against him for supporting Trump throughout his various legal woes. Tribe has been pushing for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office from the day former FBI Director James Comey was sacked. Since then, he’s urged House Democrats to take the impeachment plunge and, when they finally got there, counseled top lawmakers on how to handle it, even huddling with them personally ahead of key hearings.

As the U.S. Senate continues the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, a meme is circulating claiming that if the Senate does not convict, Trump can run for president two more times. The grammatically challenged post reads: "Want to blow a snowflakes mind? Remind them if Trump is impeached in the house and not senate, he can run 2 more times. The U.S. Constitution states that if a president is impeached by the House but not convicted by the Senate, that person’s first term is nullified and they are eligible to run for office two more times." The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed... "It’s totally false. Ludicrous. Wholly made up," said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, co-author of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment." It’s as simple as the beginning of  Section 1 of the 22nd Amendment, University of Missouri law professor and impeachment expert Frank Bowman told us. It reads: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."

MSNBC's Chris Hayes with Neal Katyal and Laurence Tribe about Bolton's new information and how Chief Justice Roberts can make rulings.

Stephen Colbert tore into the arguments used by President Donald Trump’s defenders, who claim abuse of power isn’t impeachable because it’s not a crime. “You don’t have to break the law to get fired,” the “Late Show” host said on Monday. “It may not be against the law for you to dunk your junk in my cappuccino, but I still want you fired. America does not run on junk-dunking.” Then, Colbert cited Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, who said the idea that only criminal acts are impeachable has “died a thousand deaths” in legal writings, yet “staggers on like a vengeful zombie.”