Laurence Tribe

Several Constitutional law professors have weighed in on the endless debates surrounding the propriety of protesting during the national anthem, most of whom called it a “complicated” issue...While most professors surveyed by Campus Reform agreed that both Collett and Brady made legitimate claims, only one—esteemed Harvard University Law School Professor Laurence Tribe—came down strongly on the side of Brady. “In recent days, I have been explaining on Twitter and elsewhere why I believe players have a strong First Amendment claim under the landmark Supreme Court precedent of West Virginia Bd of Education v Barnette (1943), which held that no government official—a category that certainly includes the president—may pressure people to salute the American flag or follow any government-specified way of expressing their views about the pledge of allegiance or the national anthem,” Tribe told Campus Reform, arguing that “football players cannot be required to leave their free speech rights in the locker room.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Ron Fein. Can Massachusetts take a stand against foreign influence in our elections? On Wednesday, a legislative committee will consider a bill to plug a loophole that the federal government has left wide open for foreign influence. There are many ways for foreign interests to influence elections here. We saw several of them in 2016, like the Russian government’s sophisticated computer hacking attacks on state election systems, or its intelligence operatives’ high-stakes meeting with Trump campaign officials on the promise of sharing potentially compromising information.

A School of Public Health student is among a half dozen undocumented young people suing President Donald Trump over his move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Filed in a San Francisco federal court Monday, the lawsuit charges that the Trump administration violated the due process rights of young people protected from deportation under DACA...The lawsuit’s other plaintiffs include two middle school teachers who work with at-risk youth, a formerly homeless attorney, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, and a law student. Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 is on the legal team providing the Dreamers pro bono counsel.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Ron Fein. A federal judge in Arizona will soon consider whether to overturn President Trump’s pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. The answer to this question has consequences not just for Arpaio and the people he hurt but also for the entire country. And although the conventional legal wisdom has been that a presidential decision to grant a pardon is unreviewable, that is wrong. In this circumstance, Trump’s decision to pardon Arpaio was unconstitutional and should be overturned.

In a profession marked by pomp and pretence, Richard Posner, who is retiring from the judiciary, is a renegade. For Dick, as he is known to his staff, the tradition of clerks addressing their bosses as “judge” exemplifies the judiciary’s stodginess and resistance to innovation...Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School says Mr Posner has had a “uniquely broad influence” on the legal academy and on America’s courts.

...When asked by Mic, constitutional law scholars were split on whether DACA is legal — though a large number wrote Trump recently to argue for the program’s constitutionality...Laurence Tribe, a leading constitutional scholar who has been an outspoken Trump critic, said Trump’s disdain for DACA did not square with his travel ban action, a critique echoed by the legal scholars Mic interviewed across the board. “Trump argues for the religiously discriminatory travel ban by relying on sweeping presidential power to regulate immigration and then turns around and argues that clearly reasonable protection of involuntary child immigrants is beyond the power of the president.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Monday responded harshly to reports that President Trump was inclined to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program...Laurence Tribe posits a broader protection beyond simply using the information DACA beneficiaries provided, citing a series of cases “involving government pulling the rug out from under those who rely to their detriment on its express or implied promises that would form part of the legal narrative.” He tells Right Turn, “Clearly, in serving its interests in smoking people without papers out of the shadows and into the open, the government — by promising them that, if they registered for DACA and complied with various other conditions, they’d not be targeted for deportation — created not just some technical estoppel but a basic duty as a matter of due process of law.”

In the wake of the Charlottesville protests during which James Alex Fields Jr. killed one and injured numerous others with his car, a rally to be headlined by white supremacist Richard Spencer, which was scheduled to take place on September 11 at Texas A&M University, has been cancelled...The Dallas Morning News writes: "State Rep. John Raney, R-College Station, told reporters in Austin that the event was canceled after concerns about hate messages on Facebook and several reports of people saying they'd bring their weapons." In an effort to better understand the situation as it pertains to the First Amendment, The Daily Wire spoke with Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard. Tribe said that “more facts” would be necessary to properly assess any First Amendment violation, however, the “basic principles are clear.”

The push for Internet businesses to remove hateful speech spread to an influential corner of the tech industry on Monday as web registration service GoDaddy delisted a prominent neo-Nazi site in the wake of violent clashes over the weekend in Charlottesville...Liberal activists and even some conservatives praised GoDaddy’s decision in the wake of Saturday’s attack, saying the move represented a shift by tech corporations to take more responsibility. “It’s well past time for platforms that already exercise some discretion to stop pretending they are just dumb pipes that allow all types of garbage to flow through them,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “It seems to me a significant move in a direction that is long overdue.”

President Trump is transforming the study of constitutional law. The nation’s law professors have spent the summer revising their courses to take account of a president who generates fresh constitutional questions by the tweet. When classes start in the coming weeks, law students will be studying more than dusty doctrine. They will also be considering an array of pressing questions...“Teaching the Constitution has never felt more urgent, like unraveling a mix of ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ but with the highest possible stakes,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard and vocal critic of Mr. Trump, who also represents plaintiffs challenging foreign payments to Mr. Trump’s companies.

The Washington Post reported Monday night that President Donald Trump orchestrated his son Donald Jr.‘s initial statement regarding his meeting with a Russian attorney during the presidential campaign...Prof. Laurence Tribe is a known critic of President Trump, but he backed up his tweet by saying that POTUS knew that this topic would come up in a Justice Department investigation. Politicians are known to spin facts, and flat out lie to the media when it suits their purposes...“Not every politician — not by a long shot — is under a DOJ investigation that involves a son (and son-in-law) also under DOJ investigation when the politician concocts a lie for his son,” Tribe said.

Mixed messages are a hallmark of the Donald Trump presidency. So it is no surprise that in the wake of a Washington Post story on July 20th depicting Mr Trump as curious about the extent of his pardon power, contradictory spins emerged from different corners of the White House. Jay Sekulow, Mr Trump’s lawyer, flatly denied the report that, under investigation for suspicious ties to Russia, the president is looking into ways to shield his aides and himself...For Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Richard Painter and Norm Eisen, ethics czars for George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the impeachment exception in the constitution “would make no sense if the president could pardon himself."

Today President Trump berates, insults, attacks, undermines and humiliates Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in my view as part of a plan to remove Sessions and fire special counsel Robert Mueller. These aggressive acts of obstruction of justice would violate the presidential oath of office, the president’s duty to preserve and protect the constitution, the president’s duty to faithfully execute the laws of the land, and the president’s duty to protect the nation from foreign enemies...Among the truest words describing the Trump presidency were written by Professor Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, in an op-ed in The Washington Post discussing impeachment and obstruction of justice.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe defended a company’s right to scrape data from LinkedIn at a federal injunction hearing Thursday, saying barring it would be no different than barring speakers from a public square, in a case that the judge said has “serious implications” for privacy rights and access to information on the internet. “If you exclude someone from sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, you are excluding them from the modern version of the town square,” Tribe told U.S. District Judge Edward Chen. Tribe, an expert in constitutional law, was defending the right of his client, HiQ, to track changes LinkedIn members make to their profiles, even changes they choose not to publicize.

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump, who acts as his senior White House adviser, secured a multimillion-dollar Manhattan real estate deal with a Soviet-born oligarch whose company was cited in a major New York money laundering case now being probed by members of Congress. A Guardian investigation has established a series of overlapping ties and relationships involving alleged Russian money laundering, New York real estate deals and members of Trump’s inner circle...Constitutional experts are also demanding an official inquiry. “We need a full accounting by Trump’s justice department of the unexplained and frankly outrageous settlement that is likely to be just the tip of a vast financial iceberg,” said Laurence Tribe, Harvard University professor of constitutional law.

President Trump is considering pardoning family members and staffers caught up in the Russia investigation, but legal experts warn that it could backfire by making it harder for them to avoid testifying. Under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, Americans are protected against self-incrimination, but people who have been pardoned are no longer under any legal jeopardy, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe told TIME. "Anyone pardoned by Trump would lose most of the 5th Amendment’s protection against compelled testimony that might otherwise have incriminated the pardoned family member or associate, making it much easier for DOJ and Congress to require such individuals to give testimony that could prove highly incriminating to Trump himself," Tribe said in an email.

The White House’s new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, isn’t scoring high marks from the school he brags about attending. A Harvard Law School professor was stunned to see Scaramucci bragging on his national television debut Sunday about getting good grades in his constitutional law course about 30 years ago. “I was surprised to hear Anthony Scaramucci mention on CNN the A- he received in the constitutional law course he took from me at Harvard in the late 1980s,” Professor Laurence Tribe told the Daily News. “The syllabus that year apparently didn't cover the issues associated with abusing the pardon power to obstruct justice. Either that, or Mr. Scaramucci has forgotten some of what he learned.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter, and Norman Eisen. Can a president pardon himself? Four days before Richard Nixon resigned, his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opined no, citing “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” We agree. The Justice Department was right that guidance could be found in the enduring principles that no one can be both the judge and the defendant in the same matter, and that no one is above the law.

...Traitors, even just accused traitors like Gadahn, are exceedingly rare in American history. That's because treason is actually a very narrowly defined crime that's awfully hard to commit. And despite the latest wild revelations in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga—Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised information as part of a Russian government effort to damage Hillary Clinton—legal experts say there is no way Junior or any Trump associate will ever get charged with treason...Even Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard, inveighed that Junior's meeting had the "stench of bribery & treason."...Noah Feldman, a Harvard legal historian who previously suggested Trump may have committed impeachable offenses, agreed. "It's defined in the Constitution, and this isn't even close," he emailed me Tuesday about a possible "treason" charge.

Donald Trump has faced an impressive array of lawsuits in his first half-year as president; July 11th brought him one more. Knight First Amendment Institute et al v Donald Trump, Sean Spicer and Daniel Scavino challenges the 45th president’s habit of blocking Twitter users whose 140-character critiques are too biting, or too popular...Mr Trump “uses his Twitter account as the principal platform for official presidential pronouncements”, Mr [Laurence] Tribe says, which makes the legal theory underlying Knight Institute v Trump at least “plausible”, though Mr Tribe says he isn’t yet sure “the suit ought to succeed."

...Reporters from the outlet tracked down Rinat Akmestshin, a Russian American lobbyist who reportedly once was a Russian spy (he denies it). He confirmed his participation in the June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But, here’s the shocking part. Despite Trump Jr. claiming she provided no supporting information, the lobbyist told them that the Russian attorney actually did bring with her a plastic folder with “printed-out” documents detailing illicit funds allegedly being funneled to the DNC...“If it’s accurate, it obviously adds considerably to the already strong case that Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort violated a number of federal criminal prohibitions through soliciting illegal foreign assistance to a U.S. presidential campaign (and, in Jared’s case, through falsely and incompletely filling in SF86 in obtaining security clearance) and, again on the premise that this report is accurate, this information shows that they not only solicited but indeed received such assistance,” Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe told LawNewz.com.