Laurence Tribe

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. I remember well how I felt as dawn broke the morning after Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008. My hopes were boundless, my expectations unrealistic. That President Obama did not succeed in mobilizing the deeply transformative political dynamic I dared to anticipate is no doubt true, especially in light of this year’s election results. But looking back, I remain enormously proud of my former student and chief research assistant. Obama achieved great things both domestically and globally, all in the face of deeper recalcitrance and obstruction than most of us had imagined possible...The contrast with how I felt the morning after this election could not have been starker. The electoral vote victory of Donald Trump, a bigoted and ill-informed bully who called forth the worst impulses in many of his followers, and who inspired the emergence of the vilest elements of our society, including unabashed KKK racists and neo-Nazis, felt then and continues to feel utterly devastating.

Q: Can the Electoral College elect Hillary Clinton on Dec. 19? A: Yes, it may be constitutionally possible; but no, it will not happen, according to election experts....“Presidential Electors are theoretically free to vote as their consciences dictate, something the founders anticipated Electors would indeed do under Hamilton’s Electoral College invention,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told us via email. Tribe said the constitutionality of imposing a fine on a “faithless elector” is “open to doubt, and it is even more doubtful that a court would compel any Elector to be ‘faithful’ to the State’s winner-take-all outcome.

In November 2000, as the Florida recount gripped the nation, a newly elected Democratic senator from New York took a break from an upstate victory tour to address the possibility that Al Gore could wind up winning the popular vote but losing the presidential election. She was unequivocal. “I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people,” Hillary Clinton said, “and to me that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.” Sixteen years later, the Electoral College is still standing...Some states have discussed a possibility that would not necessarily require amending the Constitution: jettisoning the winner-takes-all system, in which a single candidate is awarded all of a state’s electoral votes — regardless of the popular vote — and instead apportioning them to reflect the breakdown of each state’s popular vote. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, already do this. But even that approach could face a constitutional challenge from opponents, said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School.

A bipartisan group of congressional members and candidates is filing a federal suit Friday against the Federal Election Commission, seeking to force the agency to act on a complaint it brought against 10 super PACs in July. ... The powerhouse legal team working on the case — which includes Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, and Richard Painter, who was the chief ethics lawyer for former president George W. Bush — faces an uphill fight. Half a dozen federal appellate courts have held that contribution limits cannot be placed on groups doing independent spending.

This year, Dorothy E. Roberts ’80, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a leading scholar on legal and biosocial theory, is…

...In one way or another, Harvard Law professors helped shape Obama’s legacy. But the relationship between the Law School and the next president has yet to be defined. A trove of emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, leaked by Wikileaks in October, show that a few Law professors have caught the campaign’s attention. And Clinton’s campaign has contacted at least one about serving in her administration if she wins next Tuesday. There is no indication that Trump’s campaign has contacted any Law professors. “I think law is about policy choices so by definition we are always involved in policy choices,” Law professor Christine A. Desan said, referring to her fellow faculty members...fewer Law School faculty members are actively and openly advising either candidate in this election—a noticeable shift from previous elections, said Law Professor and former U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fried.

Eleven days before the election, the FBI stepped back into the realm of presidential politics Friday, with FBI Director James Comey saying agents had found emails that might be of relevance to an earlier investigation of Hillary Clinton. Comey’s letter to Congressional leaders was short. It was vague. And it was political dynamite. Donald Trump seized on it. Clinton decried it. The timing is unprecedented. This hour On Point, October surprise. The FBI and this wild campaign. Guests...Larry Tribe, professor of constitutional law at the Harvard University Law School.

Harvard's Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) joined Jim to talk about the Supreme Court, and the 2016 election. Tribe said that the court is doing its job, and doing its best. However, with the court divided four to four, it means that some lower court decisions will have the last word. "An eight justice court cannot be allowed to become the new normal," he said. Tribe said that Merrick Garland would be a great justice, and deserves a most serious deliberation.

When Donald Trump recently asked his supporters in Ohio to keep an eye out for voter fraud on election day, his plea came with a knowing suggestion: “When [I] say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?”...Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School agrees that Mr Trump’s “First Amendment defence would no longer be airtight” if his campaign advocated racial harassment at “a rally in close proximity to the time and place where people were waiting to cast their ballots”.

Lawrence talks to Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, one of the nation's leading constitutional scholars and lawyers, about his offer to provide free legal help to any of Donald Trump's accusers.

In what was supposed to be a major policy speech on his first 100 days as president, Donald Trump’s only new proposal was vowing to sue the women who have accused him of sexual assault. But in response, some prominent First Amendment attorneys are vowing to defend Trump’s accusers pro bono, or free of charge. Ted Boutrous of the law firm Gibson Dunn and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe have thrown their hats into the ring on social media, and Boutrous says there are others willing to follow suit.

...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who was a member of Gore’s legal team, said in an email that the timing and nature of Trump’s statements made comparisons to Bush v. Gore “off-point.” “Launching challenges after the election based on such demonstrated irregularities bears no resemblance to deliberately withholding the standard agreement that, once the official results have been certified after all postelection challenges have been resolved, one will abide by the final outcome,” Tribe said. Asked if he would accept the election results, Trump said at the debate that he would “look at it at the time.” He later said that he would accept the results if he won. Tribe said that the candidate’s comments were “totally disqualifying.” “To create mystery and suspense over one’s willingness to live by democracy’s verdict after repeatedly claiming that the only way one could lose would be as a result of a ‘rigged election’ is to challenge the very principles that have made our national transitions of power peaceful throughout our history,” Tribe said. “It is to invite nothing short of civil war.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. As the countdown to the November 8 election proceeds, one major party candidate continues his jihad against American democracy, twisting the knife ever deeper not just into himself and his unhinged quest for the most powerful position on the planet but into the very heart of our body politic. And he defends doing so by deliberately misapplying what happened 16 years ago in Bush v. Gore, a case in which I represented Vice President Gore both as lead counsel in all the briefs filed on his behalf in the Supreme Court and as the oral advocate in the first of the two Supreme Court arguments in that fateful case.

Hillary Clinton’s top campaign aide asked a billionaire donor to enlist a leading environmental activist to stage protests against a Harvard legal scholar arguing against environmental regulations in court, hacked emails show. In a March 2015 email to environmentalist and hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta asked him to solicit the help of radical environmentalist Bill McKibben to organize protests at Harvard. Podesta hoped to target Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who was representing coal company Peabody Energy in federal litigation challenging Environmental Protection Agency regulations on carbon emissions from power plants...In an emailed statement, Tribe, a liberal legal scholar whose students have included a young Barack Obama, pushed back against Podesta’s suggestion that he had taken a position against EPA regulations at the behest of Peabody Coal. “I have long liked John Podesta (and am working hard for Hillary Clinton’s election) but I strongly disagree with John’s supposed reaction to my role in challenging the legality and constitutionality of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which I doubted before agreeing to represent the Plan’s industry opponents,” he wrote.

"I feel very strongly about our Constitution," Donald Trump told Fox News in January. "I'm proud of it, I love it, and I want to go through the Constitution." It must be a love/hate relationship that the Republican presidential nominee has with the Constitution of the United States, because many of his plans and statements would violate many of its most important amendments. "It would take more time than I can spare today to list all the provisions of the Constitution, and all the principles underlying it, that contradict Trump's various pronouncements about what he wants to do," Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, told ATTN: in an email.

Donald Trump reiterated Thursday that he’s preparing a lawsuit against The New York Times after the paper published what he called a “fabricated” account of new sexual assault allegations against the Republican nominee....“Trump has no case at all,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, told The New Republic in an email. “It’s really not even debatable,” said Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union. Both Tribe and Strossen said Trump would need to meet the legal standard of the landmark Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and prove, in Tribe’s words, that the story “was factually false and that the Times either knew that it was false or was reckless in the story’s creation and reporting.” “Trump could not possibly meet that standard,” Tribe said, “and his case would be dead on arrival. It wouldn’t even reach the discovery stage.”

Before Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe went to war with the Obama administration in court, he wanted a job as a top White House lawyer, new leaked emails reveal. The legal heavyweight and former mentor to President Obama has gained notoriety in some liberal and environmental circles for representing the coal industry in a lawsuit attacking President Obama's signature climate change policy. That might have turned out differently if Obama had given him one of the administration jobs he asked for back in 2008...Asked about his 2008 emails, Tribe said today in an interview, "I wanted to be helpful to the administration, and it turned out that the position that made the most sense both to the president and the attorney general ... was as the first senior counselor to access to justice." He said he was glad he had held that job and wasn't afraid then to speak up when his views conflicted with administration policies. "I didn't always agree with the legal initiatives that the president was taking," he said.

In a presidential campaign featuring many firsts, one of the most startling came Sunday night when Republican nominee Donald Trump, to scattered cheers from the audience, pledged to have the Democratic nominee investigated criminally, should he prevail in November...some prominent lawyers and legal scholars took umbrage at the threat and expressed alarm. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Fortune that even threatening such a thing was “incompatible with the survival of a stable constitutional republic,” while carrying out such a threat would constitute an “impeachable offense.”

In Massachusetts, both members of an unmarried couple can now be considered the parents of their children, even though only one is the biological parent. That's the unanimous decision of the state's highest court..."This decision, in the long run, points to the severance of parentage from biological obsession, that is, whether the two people are two men or two women or a man and woman really shouldn't matter in terms of who gets to at least make a case to a court that it's in the best interests of the child that that person have parental rights," said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

...On Tuesday, 10 judges of the D.C. Circuit gathered to hear oral arguments in the sweeping legal challenge to the plan, which was filed last year by 27 Republican-governed states, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the coal industry. The hearing was careful, sometimes agitated, and unusually long: Excluding a short break for lunch, the arguments ran almost seven hours....Tatel, who is blind, asked Rivkin if the Americans with Disabilities Act would also abuse the state’s local permitting powers. (The ADA more or less forces states to approve certain curb or wheelchair ramp designs.) Rivkin could not supply a coherent answer. But Larry Tribe could. Tribe, Obama’s one-time legal mentor and a lion of liberal constitutional law, has famously become one of the Clean Power Plan’s most unrelenting critics. The ADA itself was perfectly legal, he said. The better comparison would be if an executive agency went to the states and forced them each to pass a mini-ADA or give in to federal control...Tribe’s larger argument is that the Clean Power Plan abuses the separation of federal powers. “The solution is to go to Congress. The structural integrity of our federal government can’t depend on this court’s evaluation of whether Congress is being productive or not,” he said.

President Obama’s signature effort to combat global warming was alternately lauded as a reasonable attempt to move the nation toward cleaner energy sources and faulted as an unconstitutional, job-killing power grab during seven hours of vigorous legal arguments Tuesday....Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard law professor and former teacher of President Obama, argued against the plan on behalf of Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal company. Tribe said the EPA is inappropriately stepping in where Congress has failed to act on climate change. Doing so created fundamental concerns about overreach by the executive branch, he said. “There’s a reason 27 states are on the petitioners’ side and 19 are on the other,” Tribe asserted.