Laurence Tribe

Well-known legal scholar, recognized constitutional law expert and member of the faculty at Harvard Law School, Professor Laurence Tribe, went on a Twitter rampage for the ages on Wednesday. It was all in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s major press conference at which his lawyer, Sheri Dillon, was tasked with explaining the plan devised by Trump’s legal team for how his businesses will be run while he is serving as president. Tribe even went on to tell LawNewz.com that “the whole phony setup would make President Trump a living, walking, talking, tweeting violation of the Emoluments Clause each time banks or funds linked to foreign sovereigns are allowed to take steps that Trump will necessarily know are enriching the total value of his family’s mega-business.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement Wednesday that he’ll transfer management of his business empire to his sons — but will not divest the assets — won’t ease concerns about his conflicts of interest, say legal specialists...“It does not solve any of the problems,’’ Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe said of the plan. “It’s a complete ruse.”...Harvard’s Tribe, a constitutional law professor, said Trump’s trust plan still allows foreign governments to curry favor with the president and enhance his wealth, in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. This is a provision that bars presidents from receiving funds from foreign governments. “Everyone in the world knows when they play golf at one of his courses or pay a lot of money at one of his hotels, that they are benefiting him and benefiting his brand,’’ Tribe said.

The director of the US Office of Government Ethics has criticised Donald Trump's plan to hand control of his business empire to his sons before his inauguration on 20 January..."As I listened, my jaw dropped. Trump's workaround is a totally fraudulent runaround," tweeted Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard University, one of the leading constitutional lawyers in the US. "Trump's announced structure is cleverly designed to dazzle and deceive, but it solves none of the serious ethical or legal issues. Trump's lawyer would flunk constitutional law at any halfway decent law school. At least if the lawyer wasn't just joking."

President-elect Donald Trump’s strategy on addressing his conflicts of interest seemed to be to throw out as many bells and whistles as possible, sprinkle some remarks from highly compensated lawyers and hope he could muscle his way through concerns that he is setting up a scheme that will invite corruption and run afoul of the Constitution...His lawyer also claimed that the emoluments clause does not cover arm’s-length transactions. This is blatantly false. In a detailed legal memo prepared by Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter and Norman Eisen, they found: To start, the text supports this conclusion; since emoluments are properly defined as including “profit” from any employment, as well as “salary,” it is clear that even remuneration fairly earned in commerce can qualify...Tribe separately commented to me, “The steps he is taking constitute at best a Potemkin trust, to coin a phrase. He remains a walking, tweeting violation of the Emoluments Clause from the moment he takes office.”

An essay by Norman Eisen, Richard W. Painter and Laurence H. Tribe. Never in American history has a president-elect posed more conflict-of-interest and foreign-entanglement questions than Donald J. Trump. Trump, the owner of a large real estate and licensing business with holdings around the world, has promised that on January 11, less than two weeks before he takes office, he will announce his plan to separate himself from his businesses. After repeatedly hesitating and delaying, will he finally do the right thing? Here are five key questions we must ask to evaluate whether the plan truly mitigates the risk of corruption and scandal.

A group of more than 1,100 law school professors from across the country is sending a letter to Congress on Tuesday urging the Senate to reject the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general. The letter, signed by professors from 170 law schools in 48 states, is also scheduled to run as a full-page newspaper ad aimed at members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be holding confirmation hearings for Sessions on Jan. 10-11...“We are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation’s laws and promote justice and equality in the United States,” states the letter, signed by prominent legal scholars including Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School, Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California at Irvine School of Law.

Dean of Harvard Law School Martha L. Minow will step down at the end of the academic year to return to teaching full-time, ending an eight-year tenure as dean that spanned a global financial crisis, federal Title IX scrutiny, and widespread student protest...“Being a scholar and a teacher was my highest aspiration. I’ve loved it and I am eager to return to it,” Minow said in an interview...“I cannot imagine as good a dean for the Law School [as Minow],” Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe said. “I think that Drew Faust made a wise and brilliant selection in persuading Martha to become dean of the law school and I look forward to working with President Faust to finding a successor, but I think Martha’s shoes are impossible to fill.”...Nino Monea, the Law School’s student body president, said he enjoyed working with Minow, even as he challenged her and the administration to address student concerns...Law School professor Bruce H. Mann said he regarded Minow as someone who lives by her principles and has done a terrific job of leading the Law School.

A letter by Laurence Tribe and Mark Green...All the moves discussed by the Trumps to resolve their potential conflicts of interest add up to sacrificing pawns to protect the king(dom) — the Trump Organization. The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause is unambiguous. It forbids an American president from accepting anything of value from a foreign entity, without congressional consent, because that would open the door to bribery or extortion. The only way for President-elect Donald Trump to cure this problem would be an arms-length sale by a public trustee, not piecemeal judgments after Jan. 20 about the thousands of possible winks and nods between foreign leaders and the new administration.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The story of the Supreme Court in 2016 can be summarized in a statistic: It’s been 311 days since Justice Antonin Scalia died on Feb. 13, and his seat remains unfilled. That’s not the longest Supreme Court vacancy in the modern era, but it’s about to enter second place -- and it will become the longest if Donald Trump’s nominee isn’t confirmed before the end of March. This striking fact will be front and center when the history of the court in 2016 is written. But what really matters isn’t the length of the vacancy. It’s the election in the middle of it. The Republican Senate changed the rules of confirmation drastically by refusing even to consider Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination. And against the odds, it paid off for them...More recently, the confirmation process for Robert Bork in 1987 had epochal consequences. For the first time, judicial philosophy was the focus. No one disputed Bork’s intelligence or qualifications. Instead liberals, including law professors like my colleague Laurence Tribe, criticized Bork’s conservatism as opposition to fundamental rights...As it turned out, that also meant that Tribe’s generational successor in that role, Cass Sunstein...also had little chance of being nominated, despite being much more centrist than Tribe and just as qualified in his own right. The rules of the game had changed.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. When Donald Trump swears at the inauguration that he will “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States”, he will be committing a violation of constitutional magnitude. The US constitution flatly prohibits any “Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States]” from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State”.

Up to five years of tax returns could be required to run for president in Massachusetts in 2020 if state Sen. Mike Barrett has anything to do with it...Larry Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, told The Minuteman Barrett's efforts are a step forward in financial and political transparency. "Senator Mike Barrett's tax-return-release bill is just the kind of effort through which the Commonwealth can set an example of good government for the rest of the nation to follow," Tribe said in an email. "I congratulate Mike on his creativity and on the care he's taking to meet all federal constitutional requirements."

...Harvard University constitutional law professor Lawrence Lessig earlier this week suggested as many as 20 Republican electors were considering changing their minds about Trump, though that report has not been confirmed...Many constitutional lawyers question whether those laws are constitutionally enforceable. However, the effort to allow the electors to vote their conscience was dealt a blow earlier this week when a Colorado judge ruled that electors in that state were not allowed to switch their votes. Given the hurdles, the anti-Trump revolt is unlikely to succeed, admits Larry Tribe, another professor at Harvard Law School. But Tribe insists that electors “have a responsibility to the country and the Constitution, in extreme enough situations.” “And I think this is a pretty extreme situation,” he said.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Mark Green. For those worried about corruption and cronyism, Donald Trump’s coming for-profit presidency will hardly “drain the swamp.” Rather, it will create a new one, albeit with large, gold-plated all caps letters branding it a TRUMP property. His recent late-night misdirection by tweet on a busy news day, calling off a planned press conference on potential conflicts of interest, was clever but predictable — and predictably wrong. His effort to combine public service and self-enrichment would be blatantly unethical, unprecedented and unconstitutional.

Three of Donald Trump’s adult children attended a Wednesday meeting the president-elect convened with top Silicon Valley executives, prompting backlash from critics with questions about conflicts of interests...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, pointed out that mixing politics and business comes with inherent issues. “Next time one of those ‘children’ meets or talks with a Silicon Valley leader about a matter of interest to Trump's business empire, that leader will certainly know that he or she is dealing with a member of the President's inner circle of government power,” Tribe said.

President-elect Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns during the campaign and there is no sign that he will, ever. He broke longstanding tradition and set a terrible precedent for future presidential candidates. Good government groups have been wringing their hands about what to do. Now comes an excellent idea from a New York State senator, Brad Hoylman, a Democrat from Manhattan, that would could force candidates to disclose their tax returns by making it a requirement for getting on the ballot...As drafted, the bill should withstand constitutional scrutiny, said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard. “Ballot access requirements vary significantly from state to state, and it seems that N.Y. might be able to simply add tax disclosure as a procedural ballot access requirement,” he wrote in an email.

On Jan. 20, 2017, the following words are likely to be uttered, "I, Donald J. Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."...And two prominent Constitutional Law professors told me that a Muslim registry would violate that amendment. According to my interview with Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, implementing a Muslim registry would violate the First Amendment. What's more, Mr. Tribe believes that Mr. Trump would violate the First Amendment whether he signed a law sent to him by Congress that created a Muslim registry or implemented one through an executive order. And Mr. Tribe believes that Congress and/or the courts would have the power to stop such an executive order if Mr. Trump issued it.

...Same-sex marriage, which has been legal in all 50 states since the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, was not one of the key issues raised by President-elect Donald J. Trump during the 2016 campaign...Yet one could forgive these couples for thinking Mr. Trump may be of two minds about gay marriage...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, called the Obergefell ruling, “a decision as close to being etched in stone as any Supreme Court decision in recent years.”

If Donald Trump decides not to give up ownership of his businesses, he could be at risk of violating the U.S. Constitution as soon as he’s sworn in...Constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe argues that Trump is set to become “a walking, talking violation of the Constitution” if he doesn’t give up his businesses. “From the very moment he takes the oath, he will be violating a provision of the Constitution that he takes an oath to uphold every minute of every day,” said Tribe, a professor at Harvard University.

Donald Trump's business dealings and his family's ongoing involvement in his finances will make the President-elect "a walking, talking violation of the Constitution" when he takes office, according to a legal expert. Professor Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard University, claimed Mr Trump's involvement in business could cause conflicts of interest, in line with the US Constitution's "emoluments clause"...But Professor Tribe said the President-elect would need to go further and sell off all his business interests to remove himself of emoluments difficulties. "[Mr Trump] is a constant emolument magnet. He thinks of himself as a babe magnet, but he's an emoluments magnet," Professor Tribe added.

On the campaign trail, education often took a backseat to issues like trade and immigration for Donald Trump. He offered few concrete details about his plans, which were often vague and even at odds with what any president has the power to do. Yet the tone of his campaign—and his rhetoric on issues ranging from minorities to climate change—has many educators and academics worried about the future of liberal arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. “Donald Trump has shown a contempt for science, a willingness to play fast and loose with the very idea of truth and an absence of intellectual curiosity,” says Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. “This leaves me with the sinking feeling that he will have a terribly destructive impact on the entire project of making excellent education broadly available.”

Far from ending with President-elect Trump’s announcement that he will separate himself from the management of his business empire, the constitutional debate about the meaning of the Emoluments Clause — and whether Trump will be violating it — is likely just beginning...Professor Laurence Tribe, the author of the leading treatise on constitutional law, and others said the Emoluments Clause was more sweeping, and mandated a ban on such dealings without congressional approval. Painter now largely agrees, telling ProPublica that no fair market value test would apply to the sale of services (specifically including hotel rooms), and such a test would apply only to the sale of goods. The Trump Organization mostly sells services, such as hotel stays, golf memberships, branding deals and management services.