Laurence Tribe

...This is one more arena in which Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns becomes relevant. “One of the many problems with the president’s continuing business dealings with foreign countries is that without his tax returns, we do not know the full extent of his violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution,” Libowitz explains. “We seek to change that.” Indeed, where there is no legal compunction for the president now to release his tax returns absent action by Congress (which Republicans will never permit), litigation offers an avenue for ferreting out his finances. “All kinds of relevant information — including the tax returns Trump is fighting to hide — are likely to be demanded in the course of discovery,” says attorney Laurence H. Tribe, one of the lawyers on the case.

...If the president was happy with Lichtman's analysis then, he might not be so thrilled with this next prediction: "the prediction of impeachment," as Lichtman calls it. He expects the House of Representatives will formally vote that the Senate should try, convict, and remove the President from office within his first term...Still, to initiate impeachment proceedings in the House would require overwhelming public support for legislators to consider forming the judiciary committee. The committee would have to find the person has committed specific articles of impeachment — treason, bribery or "high crimes or misdemeanours," a catchall term vague enough to permit impeachment "even in the least appropriate cases," says Harvard University Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe, like "the garden-variety offence" of lying under oath about a prior sexual affair.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe, Richard W. Painter, and Norman L. Eisen. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump broke with decades of tradition and declined to release to the public his federal tax returns, as every president since Richard Nixon had done. Trump's decision highlighted the fact, previously unknown to many, that prior candidates had released their tax return not due to a legal obligation, but because they believed -- correctly -- that the information was important to voters.

A U.S. agency ruling affirming President Donald Trump’s right to operate a hotel in a Washington building leased from the government has opened a potential new legal battle over whether the contract grants him benefits in violation of the Constitution...“He’s getting a major infusion of value from the General Services Administration,’’ said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University who represents a watchdog group suing Trump over foreign emoluments. “He can use his hotel in the heart of Washington as a way of attracting still more emoluments, both foreign and domestic.’’

...By the hour, it seems, the legal and financial noose of convicting certainty is tightening around the necks of Trump’s campaign aides, and even some within his Cabinet, whose prime reason for appointment now appears to center around their ties to Russia. If some reports are to be believed, under the weight of mounting evidence, which could lead to his impeachment or imprisonment, Trump is ostensibly considering resignation. But don’t light up the fireworks — at least, not just yet...“As it stands today, the Constitution contains a serious design flaw,” Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Laurence Tribe told me Sunday in an email communication.

There are 205 accredited law schools in the US. If Neil Gorsuch is confirmed for the Supreme Court, two-thirds of the current justices will have studied at just one of them: Harvard...“It does mean something and it does matter,” says Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The Supreme Court didn’t use to be this way...Earlier courts were quite geographically diverse and educationally diverse.”...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law specialist at Harvard, says the court would benefit from greater diversity. The homogeneity of education and professional experience among the nine justices “skews the perspectives they bring” to the 70 or so cases decided each year. Along with complex legalities, those disputes turn on “questions of perspective and empathy, understanding of how the world works and what makes human, rather than just legalistic, sense”, he says...Richard Lazarus, a Harvard professor who has argued 13 Supreme Court cases, says the Trump presidency, already entangled in a series of legal challenges, could reverse the decline as idealistic young people conclude anew that “law matters”.

My friend Cheryl Pelicano is a blue sparkler in the circus of red that is South Carolina. And like all Democrats, she is aghast at everything related to President Trump. But all this Russia stuff, especially the latest involving Michael Flynn and his request for immunity, compelled Pelicano to ask me a series of “how can we get rid of this guy?” questions. So, I asked Laurence Tribe, legendary constitutional law professor at Harvard University, for the answers...“We’re in totally uncharted waters here,” Tribe told me via email. To say that he thinks Trump is illegitimately in the White House would be an understatement.

A Mexican man who had been arrested despite his participation in a program designed to prevent the deportation of those brought to the U.S. illegally as children walked free after more than six weeks in custody...His legal team, which includes the Los Angeles-based pro bono firm Public Counsel and Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, pressed claims in federal court that the arrest and detention violated Ramirez's constitutional rights.

One of the first young undocumented immigrants to be detained under President Donald Trump’s new deportation priorities is expected to be released on Wednesday, his attorneys announced. An immigration judge in Seattle agreed on Tuesday to allow Daniel Ramirez Medina, 24, to post a $15,000 bond in exchange for his release — all while a challenge to his deportation and a separate case in federal court proceed through separate tracks. He has no criminal record...Laurence Tribe, a prominent Harvard law professor who is contributing to Ramirez’s legal efforts, said on Twitter that the immigrant’s fight “isn’t over.”

With all eyes focused on the Republican struggle to replace Obamacare on Thursday, a federal agency (overseen by President Donald Trump) told the Trump Organization (overseen by President Donald Trump) that a Washington hotel (owned by President Donald Trump) could continue leasing the land it sits on from the federal government...But Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor, described the GSA’s ruling in a Bloomberg News interview as “bizarre.” “It’s not hard to conclude that GSA is disinclined to displease the president of the United States,” Tribe added.

President Donald Trump’s Washington hotel isn’t violating the terms of a lease with the U.S. government that appeared to ban elected officials from participating, according to the federal agency that serves as the hotel’s landlord. The General Services Administration, which oversees the lease for Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., said in a letter Thursday that Trump’s company was “in full compliance” with the pact, which was signed in 2013...“It’s not hard to conclude that GSA is disinclined to displease the president of the United States,” said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University who’s part of CREW’s legal team. He called the agency’s determination “bizarre and hard to account for in terms of what the lease says.”

Legal experts are having a field day debating whether President Donald Trump has plunged the United States into a “Constitutional crisis,” a loaded term but a somewhat elusive concept...“In mere months, Trump has already embraced policies that threaten basic individual rights, the structure of government, and the foundations of our democratic society. We’ve even had to learn words new to most of us — like 'emoluments' — to grasp the full scope of his illegal conduct,” wrote Laurence Tribe, a professor of Constitutional law at Harvard Law School, in an email.

Daniel Ramirez Medina has been locked in a Tacoma, Washington, immigrant-detention center for a month. Neither he nor his attorneys are entirely sure why. Ramirez’s parents brought him into the country illegally as a child, but he is now a beneficiary of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program...“The government’s position is that the liberty of a human being can be treated as nothing,” he said. But that can’t be right. “If any process at all is protected by the Constitution,” [Laurence] Tribe continued, “then that was violated here. Given that [DACA recipients have] lawful presence, doesn’t that at least mean that they can’t simply be snatched up arbitrarily and put, essentially, in a prison? They are entitled to rely on government’s promise of liberty.”

Thanks to some fine work by two Bloomberg news reporters, David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby, we now know that a major Chinese financial services firm may invest $4 billion in a Manhattan skyscraper owned by the family of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner...In the eyes of some legal experts, the simple fact that Trump accepted the trademarks is a violation of the Constitution’s mandate against presidents accepting payments of any kind from foreign governments. “If the trademark has value in contributing to Trump’s wealth, the amount of the forbidden emolument might not be ascertainable before the transaction closes, but the constitutional prohibition doesn’t turn on how large the emolument turns out to be,” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in an email.

...Notably, Spicer did not take Liasson’s invitation to claim a potentially legitimate reason not to declassify wiretap evidence: that Trump did not want to appear to interfere with an ongoing investigation. Of course, if Spicer had agreed, it would have brought up innumerable other issues. For instance, if there is an ongoing investigation involving Trump wiretaps, that would be so politically explosive the Justice Department would have little choice but to appoint a special prosecutor...Lawrence Tribe, a famed professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, Justice Department official during the Obama administration, and now vociferous Trump critic, goes further. “What Sean Spicer said about the separation of powers made no sense at all,” Tribe believes. “The separation of powers provides no justification for saying that Congress rather than the president should investigate” Trump’s assertions.

Condemnation over President Trump's decision to fire U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara came fast and furious on Saturday, from both sides of the aisle. Bharara refused the administration's request to resign along with 45 other U.S. attorneys across the nation and was summarily fired, sending shockwaves across New York, where the prosecutor was known to crusade against corruption in state and local governments...Bahara "is a hero. His firing was no ordinary turnover," tweeted Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe. "It was a cowardly about-face by #conmantrump fearing Bharara's investigations."

The Wall Street Journal reports: A lawsuit filed Thursday by a Washington wine bar targets President Donald Trump’s lease with the federal government to rent the Old Post Office downtown, with the aim of forcing him to divest himself from the Trump International Hotel operating in the historic building...The Cork Wine Bar plaintiffs could, of course, add a claim under the emoluments clause, claiming government representatives pay for hotel rooms, meals and banquet facilities that are prohibited. “An emoluments clause complaint against the president in his official capacity would be fully consistent with the unfair competition claim they have now filed against Donald J. Trump in his capacity as a private businessman,” constitutional litigator Larry Tribe tells me.

One of the nation’s most noted lawyers, Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe, has joined Rep. William Lacy Clay’s lawsuit seeking to re-install a controversial painting on a public wall in the Capitol complex. The first hearing on that lawsuit is scheduled for next Wednesday, March 15, Clay said Wednesday. Clay, D-St. Louis, announced Wednesday that Tribe would defend on 1st Amendment grounds the right of former St. Louis student David Pulphus to have his painting hang with other congressional painting contest winners.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has made no secret of the fact that he is a very vocal critic of President Donald Trump. He has disagreed with many of Trump’s policies, argued that Trump has repeatedly violated the constitution during his first six weeks in office, claimed Trump is mentally unfit to remain office, and at least twice claimed there are grounds for impeachment of the 45th president. The latest impeachment call from Tribe came early Tuesday morning in response to comments he seemingly did not agree with on the Morning Joe show when the subject of whether Trump could be impeached for his recent tweets claiming the Obama administration attempted to wiretap and bug Trump’s offices.

The Trump administration’s new travel ban “appears to be reverse engineered from the appeals court decision blocking the old one,” writes Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. “It remedies multiple legal infirmities and narrows the order’s scope.” But Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, emails Global Briefing that the key shortcomings of the original ban – and their grounding in anti-Muslim sentiment rather than in any rational assessment of likely danger -- all remain. Tribe notes that the new ban is still limited to six Muslim-majority nations.

President Trump replaced his controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries with a scaled-back version on Monday, narrowing its scope to block only new applicants for visas and removing Iraq from its coverage. The scaled-back ban represents a considerable defeat for the president, whose original executive order was met with protests and a stern rebuke from the federal judiciary...“Some of the challenges to the initial order would be blunted by the changes reflected in the newly issued travel ban, but the most fundamental constitutional infirmities in the original ban, stemming from its grounding in anti-Muslim sentiment rather than in any rational assessment of danger, all remain,” said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University constitutional law professor.