Laurence Tribe

...President Trump has empowered federal agents to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, no matter where they reside, and insists that local police officers be employed to help enforce the orders. He has pledged to cut off federal funding for communities that refuse — the so-called sanctuary cities — and his threat has had the desired chilling effect...There have been some exceptions, such as conditioning federal highway funds on states enforcing speed limits, but overall the court has said that the federal government cannot “commandeer” states to do its bidding. Laurence Tribe, the constitutional law scholar, says Trump’s threats — both overbroad and out of scale — are clearly suspect. “I think he’s violating the Constitution up and down,” Tribe said.

Late Wednesday night, the Washington Post broke the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential campaign, contacts he failed to disclose during his Senate confirmation hearings. "I did not have communications with the Russians," said Sessions during his sworn testimony...Can Jeff Sessions be prosecuted for perjury? The answer is not exactly cut and dry. At the time of his confirmation hearings, Sessions was still serving as a senator from Alabama. The Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause shields lawmakers from prosecution for lying during proceedings in the House or Senate...Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe sees it differently. "That would be a laughable misuse of the Speech and Debate Clause," he says. "He was testifying under oath as an [Attorney General] nominee, not in the discharge of any Senatorial business of his own."

With Republicans and Democrats calling for him to recuse himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and some Democrats calling for him to resign, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is fighting for his political life and livelihood...Second, so long as Sessions remains in the job, he will face pressure to resign and provide fodder for Trump critics suggesting that there is a cover-up. “The more I learn about this, the less I think Sessions has any choice but to resign or be fired,” Larry Tribe tells me. In his view, “it’s inconceivable that his error [in testimony] was an innocent one.”

The FBI rejected a request from White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus last week to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump's associates and Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to multiple US officials briefed on the matter. The White House denies any inappropriate contact occurred, claims the FBI initiated the conversation and insists Priebus only discussed the news story, not the underlying pending Russia investigation...Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe said that "the important fact is that the White House and the FBI were improperly discussing an ongoing investigation, particularly one that directly involves the President's inner circle and possibly the President himself, regardless of who initiated the communications at issue."

Opponents of President Trump’s travel ban have one big advantage — the Trump White House. If not for the confusion, lack of staffing (nary a deputy, let alone an undersecretary or assistant secretary, has been named in national security-related departments), organizational disarray, policy differences or all of the above, the administration might have put together on its first try a legally enforceable executive order...“By saying that the policy effects of the new travel ban will be essentially the same as those of the travel ban that so many federal judges found constitutionally suspect, Miller is effectively inviting federal courts to suspend the new one as well, given that the religiously discriminatory history of the ban can’t be ignored, much less erased, simply by purporting to start over again,” Supreme Court litigator and professor Larry Tribe tells me.

[Laurence Tribe] explains what it would take to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from Office.

During his confirmation hearings, scheduled to begin March 20, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will face a thorough grilling about his legal philosophy. Among the topics likely to come up are his views on "natural law" and his relationship with John Finnis, the Oxford University professor who advised Gorsuch on his Ph.D. thesis and one the world's leading proponents of this arcane legal theory. Natural law is a loosely defined term, but to many of its conservative US adherents it is essentially seen as God's law—a set of moral absolutes underpinning society itself. In recent years, natural law believers have invoked this legal theory to defend a range of anti-gay policies. Natural law has been a source of controversy for at least two previous Supreme Court nominees in recent decades—for dramatically different reasons. In 1991, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wrote a New York Times op-ed opposing the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas because he would be the "first Supreme Court nominee in 50 years to maintain that natural law should be readily consulted in constitutional interpretation."

We’re just a month into the Trump presidency, and already so many are wondering: How can we end it?...Trump still has significant political support, so the obstacles are gargantuan. But the cleanest and quickest way to remove a president involves Section 4 of the 25th Amendment and has never been attempted. It provides that the cabinet can, by a simple majority vote, strip the president of his powers and immediately hand power to the vice president. The catch is that the ousted president can object, and in that case Congress must approve the ouster by a two-thirds vote in each chamber, or the president regains office. The 25th Amendment route is to be used when a president is “unable” to carry out his duties. I asked Laurence Tribe, the Harvard professor of constitutional law, whether that could mean not just physical incapacity, but also mental instability. Or, say, the taint of having secretly colluded with Russia to steal an election? Tribe said that he believed Section 4 could be used in such a situation.

When China awarded President Donald Trump a long-coveted trademark of the “Trump” brand this week, it violated its own regulations. Chinese legal standards prohibit trademarks of the names of foreign leaders. Trump secured exclusive rights for the use of his name for “building construction services” in China on February 14 after a 10-year legal battle. But he had little success in his quest for a Chinese trademark before he became the Republican nominee last summer. The apparent preferential treatment for the U.S. president could land Trump in legal trouble back at home...If China granted a trademark to Trump in violation of existing Chinese legal standards, it “would seal Trump’s fate from an emoluments clause perspective because it would show beyond doubt that this unusually valuable trademark was indeed a ‘present,’ and not simply a recognition of Mr. Trump’s preexisting rights under the law of China,” Laurence Tribe, a nationally renowned constitutional scholar and a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told ThinkProgress.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. The sheer volume and rapidity of successive Trump outrages, cascading swiftly past one another, keeps even the most attentive among us from properly paying attention to any one of them, much less to their cumulative significance.

The detention of a young undocumented immigrant who was granted protection from deportation under an Obama Administration policy has sent a "chilling" message to other immigrants, his lawyers said...."The signal that his release on habeas corpus would send is a sigh of relief, but as of now, I think immigrants generally — including 'DREAMers' and DACA immigrants — are just holding their breath," Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, told TIME. "I think this is a brutal, inhumane and unlawful seizure of a person, and it sends a terrifying and chilling message to the country," he added.

The arrest and threatened deportation of a 23-year-old Mexican immigrant who was brought to the country illegally when he was 7 — but had a valid work permit under President Obama’s deferred-action program — has rekindled the fears of undocumented college students nationwide....Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School who is helping represent Mr. Ramirez, said in an email to The Chronicle that the message the Trump administration is sending to DACA recipients is "a dismal and frightening one. It’s telling them that this government isn’t committed to living up to the promises the Obama administration made to these recipients to induce them to come out from under the shadows."

A federal magistrate judge has ordered officials to defend the arrest of an undocumented immigrant who has protection from deportation during a raid last week, BuzzFeed News has learned. Daniel Ramirez was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Seattle, Washington, on Feb. 10 and threatened with deportation, despite being a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA, a lawsuit filed on Monday alleges...“In granting Daniel DACA status, the federal government has twice determined — after intensive scrutiny — that he presents no threat to national security or public safety,” said another one of Ramirez’s attorneys, Theodore J. Boutrous, a partner at Gibson Dunn. He is joined in the lawsuit by Erwin Chemerinsky, Laurence Tribe, lawyers from Public Counsel, Barrera Legal Group, Hawkins Law Group, and Northwest Immigrants Rights Project.

The resignation under pressure on Monday night of President Trump’s national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, centers on the F.B.I.’s scrutiny of his phone calls in late 2016 with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak...But even if Mr. Trump sanctioned the conversation, on its face the Logan Act appears to apply to a president-elect and his top aides, said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School constitutional law professor. A president-elect is not an official of the United States,” Mr. Tribe said. “There is no reason why the Logan Act would not apply to the president-elect since it applies to all private citizens, and the people working on the transition are all working in a private-citizen capacity. They have not taken the oath, so they are covered by the act — to the extent that matters.”

...Democrats and their progressive allies are marching in lock step to oppose Judge Gorsuch, whose record they find deeply troubling, and gay pundits are painting him as a homophobe. But interviews with his friends — both gay and straight — and legal experts across the political spectrum suggest that on gay issues, at least, he is not so easy to pigeonhole...Gay rights groups draw inferences from Hobby Lobby — Ms. Tiven calls the case ‘‘particularly telling’’ — to argue that Judge Gorsuch would err on the side of religious freedom in cases involving discrimination against gays. But Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, is unconvinced. “I do not agree that Hobby Lobby is a death knell that proves Judge Gorsuch would say that people can, on religious grounds, violate anti-discrimination laws,” Mr. Tribe, who said he did not have Judge Gorsuch as a student, said in a recent interview. He called the case “an indicator” but not “a slam-dunk predictor.”

A lobbying firm working for Saudi Arabia paid for a room at Donald Trump’s Washington hotel after Inauguration Day, marking the first publicly known payment on behalf of a foreign government to a Trump property since he became president...Lobbying firms typically bill expenses to their client. “If that funneling could launder the emolument, the clause would become a dead letter,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard who’s also part of the lawsuit.

The White House on Thursday “counseled” Kellyanne Conway, one of President Trump’s top advisers, in an unusual show of displeasure after she urged consumers to buy fashion products marketed by Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. Legal experts said Ms. Conway might have violated a federal ethics rule against endorsing products or promoting an associate’s financial interests...Ms. Conway’s remarks amounted to “using your government position as kind of a walking billboard for products or services offered by a private individual,” said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “She is attempting quite crudely to enrich Ivanka and therefore the president’s family.” [NYT Quotation of the Day.]

President Donald Trump engaged in a bitter struggle with the judiciary this week, as he seeks to uphold his controversial ‘Muslim ban’. On February 3, District Judge James Robart of Seattle granted a temporary restraining order on the ban after complaints that it unlawfully discriminated against Muslims. The Department of Justice subsequently filed a request for an emergency stay on the ruling with the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, claiming that there are no legal defects in President Trump’s executive order... Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, believes that Judge Robart’s ruling was correct. He told The World Weekly that President Trump’s travel ban was “religiously discriminatory and shockingly arbitrary”.

Let’s say Kanye West actually ran for president in 2020, as he has halfheartedly hinted he may on Twitter — and that he won The first lady of the United States would then be Kim Kardashian, a celebrity who rose to that status through sheer force of will, who has built a self-reinforcing business empire predicated on her celebrity and business empire...Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, answered that question by email. “If official White House functions are used to make money, whether through photographs at official events or through using the White House logo or image for advertising or in some other commercial way,” he said, “that risks violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause of Article I and the Domestic Emoluments Clause of Article II.”

Two lawyers, three judges, thousands of ordinary Americans: On Tuesday night, oral arguments in Washington v. Trump attracted an unusually large audience for audio-only legal proceedings...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, says there is case law that backs up Purcell's argument. "There is no precedent for the ridiculous suggestion that discrimination against members of a religious group becomes constitutionally acceptable whenever only a small percentage of that religious group is victimized," Tribe tells NPR. "The entire course of jurisprudence under the Religion Clauses is incompatible with any such arithmetic approach to the issue."

The president says comments in court over his travel ban are 'disgraceful,' and says the ban would only be blocked due to politics. Laurence Tribe discusses with Chris Hayes.