Laurence Tribe

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.

The nation’s second-most powerful court grappled Tuesday with the intractable and potentially catastrophic problem of climate change, weighing whether constitutional questions surrounding President Obama’s climate change regulations should trump the moral obligations of upholding a plan to curb global warming...Among the most prominent opponents of the plan is Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional authority who was Mr. Obama’s mentor at Harvard Law School. “This action by the E.P.A. is impermissible,” Mr. Tribe told the court. Judge David Tatel, an Obama appointee, appeared to disagree. He likened the rule to the Americans With Disabilities Act, in which the federal government set standards for states to make public spaces accessible to people with disabilities, and supplied states with federally devised plans for doing so. Tribe pushed back at that comparison. “Imagine if Congress had been unable to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act, as it was unable to pass cap-and-trade, and if instead that same agency told states they had to each pass a mini-A.D.A., and said if they don’t, we will use executive authority to put it into place?” he said.

The pitched battle over President Obama’s signature climate change policy, which is moving to the courts this week, carries considerable political, economic and historical stakes. Yet its legal fate, widely expected to be ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, could rest on a clerical error in an obscure provision of a 26-year-old law. That error, which left conflicting amendments on power plant regulation in the Clean Air Act, will be a major focus of oral arguments by opponents of Mr. Obama’s initiative when the case is heard on Tuesday in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit...The judges have allocated four hours to hear the arguments, rather than the usual one or two. The chief judge of the court, Merrick B. Garland, who is also Mr. Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, has recused himself. Adding to the drama will be the presence of Mr. Obama’s mentor at Harvard Law School, Laurence H. Tribe, who will argue against the climate plan on behalf of the nation’s largest coal company, Peabody Energy.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. In the early days of our nation, it was a crime to teach slaves to read. And through the first half of the 20th century, segregation funneled their descendants into inferior schools. Like the ugly attempts to disenfranchise African Americans through so-called literacy tests calculated to make them seem illiterate, these efforts were a perverse tribute to literacy’s power, which was recognized by the many people of color who fought so hard, against the odds, to educate themselves. Now, at least in theory, literacy is universally regarded as a human right. Every state makes K-12 education mandatory, and basic education has been recognized unanimously by the Supreme Court as “necessary to prepare citizens to participate effectively and intelligently in our open political system if we are to preserve freedom and independence,” to quote what Warren Burger, appointed chief justice by Richard Nixon, wrote in 1972. Yet as a carefully crafted lawsuit filed this month by seven Detroit schoolchildren reveals, deliberate indifference to public schools in already disadvantaged communities means that many children of color still do not receive an education — at least not an education that will prepare them to participate effectively and intelligently in our system.

Jamarria Hall can’t stomach walking into his high school on Detroit’s east side some days. The classrooms are hot, water fountains don’t work and only 2.2% of students last year achieved college-ready scores in reading and English...A federal civil rights lawsuit filed on Tuesday aims to challenge Hall’s educational system by asserting a constitutional right to literacy, in what attorneys say is the first legal challenge of its kind in the US. The 133-page complaint says the state of Michigan has disinvested in education in Detroit so much that children lack fundamental access to literacy...Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe, who is not involved in the litigation, said he expects the lawsuit will make history, “much as Brown v Board of Education did”. “The legal theory underlying the suit is both creative and rock-solid,” he said, “and Mark Rosenbaum’s legal team is nothing short of extraordinary.” “If you think of Brown v Board as one shoe that dropped, this is the other shoe,” he said, “because though it eliminated, technically, inferior schools for blacks, and eliminated de jure segregation, it didn’t achieve one of its basic goals. And that is a decent educational opportunity for all kids, regardless of race, regardless of class, regardless of geography. That’s become a more elusive goal.”

...Climate change, Mr. Obama often says, is the greatest long-term threat facing the world, as well as a danger already manifesting itself as droughts, storms, heat waves and flooding. More than health care, more than righting a sinking economic ship, more than the historic first of an African-American president, he believes that his efforts to slow the warming of the planet will be the most consequential legacy of his presidency...Another critic, Laurence H. Tribe, likened the rules to “burning the Constitution” — a charge that might have stung, since Mr. Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar, was a mentor to Mr. Obama at Harvard Law School. Mr. Obama dismissed the criticism as the voice of Mr. Tribe’s client, Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in April. “You know, I love Larry,” he said, but “when it comes to energy issues, Larry has a history of representing fossil fuel industries in big litigation cases.”

Differences aside, Donald Trump and Senate Republicans are strongly united on one issue — ideological balance on the Supreme Court. While Democrats are pushing the GOP-led Senate to confirm Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland by the end of President Barack Obama's term, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has been resolute in blocking him, saying the next president should fill the high court vacancy. Republicans maintain it's a winning political strategy in a year when some GOP rank and file are struggling with reasons to vote for their nominee. ... Friends of Garland point out that he went through another lengthy confirmation delay when his appeals court appointment was held up for 19 months. He was later confirmed in 1997 on a 76-23 vote. "He has given no sign of being frustrated," said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor and longtime friend to his former student.

One of the leading liberal lights of American law now says the “IRS is engaged in unconstitutional discrimination against conservative groups and must be halted.” To be clear, Harvard prof Laurence Tribe is a convert: Early in the week, he sent out a tweet dismissing the idea of an IRS scandal as long-debunked. But, as the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson noted at Overlawyered, for once social media actually shed light on a dispute: Others asked Tribe to read this month’s DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against the IRS in the case — and he did.

The unique American right to privacy – the Constitutional right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” birthed as a direct response to the British crown’s unfettered “general warrant” rights to search colonial homes is so fundamental today that nary a politician will seek to question it. The same can be said for our First Amendment’s freedom of speech and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. This is what makes so amazing how the FCC might be thumbing its nose at all three core principles in its latest “privacy rulemaking.” And the noting of this came in a major broadside delivered by the most revered constitutional scholar of the day – Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe. In a major speech before the Media Institute, Tribe says that the effort by the FCC to strictly regulate some Internet companies’ privacy practices and not others is an affront – one that will not survive constitutional scrutiny.