Laurence Tribe

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. My friend Alan Dershowitz has restated in Maclean’s his now familiar arguments against holding a sitting president fully accountable for abusing his executive powers. As I and other constitutional scholars have explained, those arguments don’t withstand scrutiny. They rely on the strange idea that, because the president is head of the executive branch, and because the three branches are supposed to be independent of one another, nothing the president does in his purely executive capacity, like granting a pardon or firing a subordinate, can be part of a criminal or impeachable obstruction of justice.

Over 30 technology companies including Alphabet Inc, Amazon.com Inc, and Facebook Inc. on Friday urged a U.S. patent court to disregard drugmaker Allergan Plc’s contention that its transfer of some of its patents to a Native American tribe shields them from the court’s review. Two trade groups comprised of tech industry leaders argued in a joint brief submitted to the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board that the board has the right to review the validity of patents covering the dry eye medicine Restasis that Allergan transferred to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe in a deal announced in September...A group of prominent law professors, including Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California at Berkeley, submitted a brief on Friday siding with the tribe and Allergan. “Far from being a scheme to shield patents from review, the agreement from the Tribe’s perspective is part of its economic development plan,” the academics said.

Donald Trump is increasingly vulnerable to charges of obstructing justice and may have inadvertently confessed following the prosecution of his former senior aide Michael Flynn, according to legal experts and senior Democrats. The US president said in a tweet on Saturday that he fired Flynn as national security adviser in February “because he lied to the vice-president and the FBI” about his discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the US last December. Flynn pleaded guilty in court on Friday to lying to FBI agents...“That’s a confession of deliberate, corrupt obstruction of justice,” said Laurence Tribe, a professor in constitutional law at Harvard University.

Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russia’s former ambassador to the U.S., admitting he violated a law that also criminalizes lying to Congress. Scholars have mixed views on whether Flynn’s guilty plea is bad news for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who allegedly lied to Congress about his contacts with the same ambassador. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told the Washington Examiner that Sessions should be concerned about facing the same charge as Flynn...Although it’s unclear what Sessions has told the FBI about his or the campaign's contact with Russia, Tribe said that his congressional testimony alone may be enough for a prosecution under the same law that Flynn admitted violating. Although it’s unclear what Sessions has told the FBI about his or the campaign's contact with Russia, Tribe said that his congressional testimony alone may be enough for a prosecution under the same law that Flynn admitted violating.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Now that Richard Cordray, the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has stepped down, President Trump wants his current budget director, former Republican congressman Mick Mulvaney, to head the CFPB in his spare time. It’s no wonder that he’d entrust the agency created to protect average Americans from unfair lending practices to a loyalist who flatly opposes the agency’s mission. But apart from his tendency to undercut nearly anything achieved during his predecessor’s tenure, and his ongoing demonstration that he cares not much about protecting the little guy — the “forgotten men and women” he waxed about with faux earnestness in his inaugural address — the president is going about it in a way that’s plainly illegal.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her allies are putting a full-court press on President Donald Trump and his administration as they battle over who has the authority to appoint the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the agency Warren championed after the financial crisis. The battle has ensued after both Trump and Richard Cordray, the recently departed head of the CFPB, both named separate successors at the agency. Cordray abruptly departed from the agency Friday...The liberal Harvard constitutional law professor, Laurence Tribe, told CNN that the original draft legislation creating CFPB in the House would have used the Federal Vacancies Act as the backing for naming an interim director..."And the law is very plain," he said. "The old law in 1998 was superseded by the new law. Time moves only in one direction. The 2011 law is specifically about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the most important bureau in the country protecting people from fraudulent lenders, from being gouged, from being abused."

A battle over who should run the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the coming months was set for court as Obama-era holdovers sought to maintain their control over a powerful watchdog which President Donald Trump is seeking to curb...While the legal battle rages, the CFPB’s enforcement work will be put in limbo. “Anything that the agency does or fails to do could be subject to challenge until this cloud is removed,” said Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe.

On May 23, an email landed in the sales inbox of a San Francisco startup called HiQ Labs, politely asking the company to go out of business. HiQ is a “people analytics” firm that creates software tools for corporate human resources departments...In other words, as far as LinkedIn was concerned, HiQ was the tuna. When the larger company’s lawyers made that clear to Weidick, he hired the law firm Farella Braun & Martel. Deepak Gupta, a partner there, thought the case might interest his former professor, Laurence Tribe...When Gupta called, talking about a battle over control of social media data, Tribe says, “my constitutional nostrils flared.”

A national campaign to impeach President Donald Trump has drawn some high-powered talent from legal academia. Two organizations, Free Speech for People and RootsAction.org, have joined forces behind Impeach Donald Trump Now, a grassroots petition drive that has collected thus far more than 1.2 million signatures, and a lobbying effort on behalf of a congressional resolution calling for an impeachment investigation. The campaign is aided by a 13-member legal advisory board, including: Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe and Lawrence Lessig...

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. After more than 40 years of experimenting with capital punishment, it is time to recognize that we have found no way to narrow the death penalty so that it applies only to the “worst of the worst.” It also remains prone to terrible errors and unacceptable arbitrariness. Arizona’s death-penalty scheme is a prime example of how capital punishment in the United States unavoidably violates the Eighth Amendment’s requirement that the death penalty not be applied arbitrarily. The Supreme Court will soon consider accepting a case challenging Arizona’s statute and the death penalty nationwide, in Hidalgo v. Arizona.

The Post reports that former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI investigators in the Robert S. Mueller III probe. That is a big deal, bigger perhaps than the announced indictments of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, whose alleged crimes did not directly implicate anyone in the campaign, let alone President Trump. We see for the first time the words “Donald J. Trump” in a federal criminal plea bargain...To some legal experts, it looks as though Papadopoulos is now cooperating with Mueller. Constitutional law guru Laurence Tribe says to “keep in mind that ‘collusion’ isn’t a term of art in the criminal law lexicon but a concept more pertinent to impeachment.” He adds, “It seems to me that the guilty plea today by ex-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, evidently cooperating with Mueller on his investigation … is likely to be the sleeper in today’s outpouring of news.”

In a rare joint venture, six U.S. Supreme Court justices who graduated from Harvard Law School will return to the campus Thursday to join the law school’s bicentennial celebration...The six alums—Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and retired Justice David Souter—will participate in a conversation with the law school’s dean, John Manning, in Sanders Theatre...The theme of the bicentennial celebration is Harvard Law School in the World...Among the programs is a reargument Friday of the landmark 1803 case, Marbury v. Madison, that established the power of the federal judiciary to strike down unconstitutional acts of Congress. Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe and former Harvard Law professor and Stanford Law dean Kathleen Sullivan of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan will face off.

...The neighbors who are at war with the redeveloper of the former Middlesex County courthouse in East Cambridge have just received some help from a big name in constitutional law. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe helped write a brief that the courthouse’s neighbors submitted to the Supreme Judicial Court earlier this month, asking the state’s highest court to reconsider its decision not to overturn an Appeals Court ruling in favor of the developer, Leggat McCall Properties. Essentially, the battle revolves around whether government immunity to local zoning rules should continue after a property moves into private ownership.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions continued to stonewall Congress by recycling an excuse he used four months ago. Sessions is seeking to avoid answering questions about his conversations with President Donald Trump, who has yet to invoke executive privilege regarding conversations with his top officials...“Attorney General Sessions is skating on very thin legal ice now that he has had more than four months to discuss the executive privilege issue with President Trump, given that his lack of opportunity to do so was the only excuse he gave for refusing to answer the Senate’s clearly relevant questions without invoking the privilege on June [13],” Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told ThinkProgress in an email.

An unprecedented effort to force President Trump and other White House hopefuls to disclose their personal income tax returns was blocked by Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday, who argued the plan would likely be overturned by the courts. Brown's veto of Senate Bill 149 put him at odds with legislative Democrats who insisted its mandate for five years of income tax information would help voters make an informed choice...Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University law professor, insisted that the California bill would pass constitutional muster. He and two other legal scholars wrote that the proposal fell on the side of being constitutionally allowed when evaluating "permissible ballot access laws and impermissible attempts to add qualifications."

One thing that’s becoming very clear to me as I report on the digital economy is that a rethink of the legal framework in which business has been conducted for many decades is going to be required. Many of the key laws that govern digital commerce (which, increasingly, is most commerce) were crafted in the 1980s or 1990s, when the internet was an entirely different place...Meanwhile, a case that might have been significant mainly to digital insiders is being given a huge publicity boost by Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, the country’s pre-eminent constitutional law scholar. He has joined the HiQ defence team because, as he told me, he believes the case is “tremendously important”, not only in terms of setting competitive rules for the digital economy, but in the realm of free speech. According to Prof Tribe, if you accept that the internet is the new town square, and “data is a central type of capital”, then it must be freely available to everyone — and LinkedIn, as a private company, cannot suddenly decide that publicly accessible, Google-searchable data is their private property.

In the wake of the breathtaking tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, with a dialog in earnest on gun control and the second amendment taking shape, I reached out to Harvard's preeminent constitutional law scholar Laurence H. Tribe. What follows is my inquiry, and Professor Tribe's response in its entirety. It's important to bear in mind what Tribe said then. We're here again.

Public high schools are sending conflicting messages to their football players and cheerleaders about possible punishment for refusing to stand during the pre-game national anthem. One Louisiana school district threatened to suspend protesting players from the team, while a New Jersey high school said the students have the First Amendment right to protest. Which is correct?...A public school that punishes a student for a silent protest could face a lawsuit for violating the student’s First Amendment rights, Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe told TheWrap. “Any student punished by a public school or other governmental entity for taking a knee could challenge the punishment successfully in court, probably with the assistance, pro bono, of the local chapter of the ACLU,” Tribe said.

Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe joins Joy Reid to explain why in his view Donald Trump may be unconstitutionally using the power of the government to pressure NFL players through the NFL.