Laurence Tribe

A group of more than 350 legal scholars on Monday called upon Senators to fulfill their constitutional obligation to consider a U.S. Supreme Court nominee submitted by President Obama. In a letter sent to Senate leaders, 356 professors and scholars said that leaving an eight-justice court in place would have dire consequences. They asserted that allowing Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat to remain unfilled until after the presidential election could cripple the court and set bad precedent...Law scholars from more than 100 law schools signed on, including Harvard Law School professors Charles Ogletree and Laurence Tribe; University of California, Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky; University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor Herma Kay; Stanford Law School professor Deborah Rhode; and New York University School of Law professor Kenji Yoshino.

Senate Republican leaders have insisted they won’t consider an Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, leaving that choice to the next president. But they may want to reconsider after this week — especially if they care about protecting the pro-business rulings that are among the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s most important legacies. ... “If Hillary is elected, and certainly if there’s a Democratic Senate, the Republicans would be much better off with a moderate nominee now,” said Laurence H. Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. “That’s a rational way of looking at it. I’d hope they’d see reason but I wouldn’t bet the family farm on it.”.

Harvard Law School constitutional expert Laurence Tribe, who was Cruz’s professor, is the most visible scholar questioning the Texan’s eligibility. “Cruz claims that the narrow, historical meaning of the Constitution is literal, except when it comes to the ‘natural born citizen’ clause,” said Tribe at a Harvard Federalist Society meeting last month. And, since the Constitution had its basis in English common law, that would mean a citizen born on American soil.

A California law that allows the state to seize unclaimed property after three years without making much of an attempt to contact the owners will not be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, but Justice Samuel Alito warned that such laws could face a serious constitutional challenge in the future. ...  In a brief penned by lawyers including Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School, challengers urged the Supreme Court to grant certiorari because “the UPL is a recipe for abuse.”

Two U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday sent strong signals to property rights advocates that they are prepared to examine the constitutionality of state unclaimed-property laws and so-called inclusionary housing ordinances. Although Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. agreed with the high court’s denial of review in Taylor v. Yee and California Building Industry Association v. City of San Jose, they wrote separately—Alito in Yee and Thomas in San Jose—to raise due process and takings concerns. In Yee, Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, representing Chris Taylor, challenged on due process grounds California’s Unclaimed Property Law, which permits the state to confiscate forgotten security deposits, uncashed money orders, unused insurance benefits and other funds if the assets lie dormant for three years.

The mostly but perhaps not entirely dismissible case against Ted Cruz's eligibility to run for president will begin to unfold on Tuesday in front of New York State Supreme Court Justice David Weinstein. He'll be hearing arguments in a lawsuit filed by two New Yorkers who claim that the junior senator from Texas, born in Calgary to an American mother and Cuban father, is not a “natural-born U.S. citizen,” and thus is constitutionally disallowed from becoming president of the United States. ... Most legal scholars have said that Cruz's mother's citizenship settles the question; there have been a few dissenters, though, notably Harvard Law School's Laurence Tribe has argued that Cruz is now arguing against his own strict reading of the Constitution.

As Iowa caucus winner Ted Cruz makes last-minute appeals for votes during Tuesday’s 11-state Republican primary bonanza, his legal team will quietly urge an Illinois judge to kill a lawsuit that claims he's ineligible to be president. The lawsuit is being heard in a state court system that grants ordinary voters standing to challenge a candidate’s ballot access, a soft target for opponents of the Canada-born Texas senator...“I do think a state court path is the most promising for challengers to Ted Cruz's eligibility at this pre-nomination stage,” says Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. His GOP rivals are “the only plausible federal plaintiffs, but even their status would be a bit tenuous on ripeness grounds," he says. Tribe, a nationally prominent legal expert who taught Cruz constitutional law, said earlier this year it’s unclear if Cruz meets the Constitution’s undefined “natural born citizen” requirement, giving intellectual heft to Cruz critics.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Justice Antonin Scalia used to say, only partly in jest, that he preferred a “dead” to a “living” Constitution: for him, the whole purpose of any constitution worth having was to nail things down so they would last—to “curtail judicial caprice” by preventing judges, himself included, from manipulating the law to advance their own visions of good policy rather than faithfully doing the people’s bidding as expressed in binding rules. Yet Scalia managed to bring our Constitution to life more deeply than have many proponents of a “living” Constitution...Scalia’s ability to bring the Constitution’s text, structure, and history to the very center of the nation’s conversation through elegant and colorful prose should never be confused with the idea that his “originalist” methods actually served the disciplining and constraining functions he attributed to them. Nor should we permit his captivating rhetoric to seduce us into accepting the judgments he claimed those methods required him to reach.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz. In 1901, Mr. Dooley—a popular, opinionated comic strip character—explained that “th’ Supreme Coort follows th’ election returns.” Dooley’s view was cynical, political, and slightly unnerving. It was also right, in important respects. Elections matter, especially in polarized times. Nowadays, Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on which election matters, let alone on judicial philosophy or temperament. A Justice selected by Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would, beyond doubt, strive toward a very different future from one selected by Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz. But as we explain in our book, Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution, no Justice—not a single one—is invariably liberal or conservative. Furthermore, a Justice’s influence on the Court can take many forms, not all of them reducible to vote tallies. This was true of Justice Antonin Scalia and it will be true of his successor. Thus, to better understand what issues lurk on the horizon for any new Justice, it is helpful to see where Scalia stuck to familiar left-right scripts and where he tossed those scripts aside.

Just one day after it emerged that President Barack Obama was vetting Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval as a potential Supreme Court nominee, the speculation bubble burst as the Republican politician removed himself from consideration. Why talk of a possible Sandoval nomination flamed out so quickly isn’t totally clear at the moment. But as the White House presses on with its nationwide search for the person to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, anyone who ends up on the shortlist will have a tricky set of factors to consider...And of course, the GOP Senate leadership could always change its mind and retreat from its pledge not to hold hearings. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told Law Blog he thinks the Senate’s position is politically untenable and that they’ll agree to have a vote. But even with the uncertainty, he thinks whoever the president puts forward will still “be honored to accept the nomination.” Mr. Tribe said he expects that person would have the “backbone to take the risk of being out there in front of a recalcitrant Senate.”

The potential outcomes of Texas cases currently before the Supreme Court changed Feb. 13 with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. But some experts say the fate of several Texas abortion clinics is dependent on a different justice — Anthony Kennedy...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said he believes Kennedy will vote to overturn the 5th Circuit’s decision. “There is no respectable way to treat the challenged Texas regulations as constitutional under the ‘undue burden’ standard,” Tribe said. Tribe, who recently co-authored a book about the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts titled Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution, said Roberts could “conceivably” side with the abortion providers in the Texas case as well, but Kennedy was “more likely” to do so.

...“Animal welfare and animal rights are two different goals within the field of animal law,” explains law professor Kristen Stilt, who teaches the animal-law survey class—an annual course typically oversubscribed on the first day of registration... A gift from Bradley L. Goldberg, founder and president of the Animal Welfare Trust, has underwritten a new Animal Law & Policy Program intended to expand the animal-law curriculum, establish an academic fellowship program, and foster future academic gatherings and scholarship...That opportunity and responsibility fall largely to Stilt, the faculty director of the new program, and Chris Green, its executive director, who must decide how to design a curriculum that covers a topic intersecting with all other areas of legal study...This past May, Loeb University Professor and constitutional-law scholar Laurence Tribe submitted an amicus letter supporting NhRP’s request for an appeal in one of its first chimpanzee cases.

The Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago has agreed to hear a lawsuit on Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility for president — virtually ensuring that the issue dominates the news in the run-up to the South Carolina primary. ... One of the constitutional scholars who used to think that the definition of "natural born" ought to include Ted Cruz is Laurence Tribe, who was Cruz's law professor at Harvard. But Tribe is now the leading scholar raising questions about Cruz's eligibility.

The potential outcomes of Texas cases currently before the Supreme Court changed Saturday with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. But some experts say the fate of several Texas abortion clinics is dependent on a different justice — Anthony Kennedy. ... Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said he believes Kennedy will vote to overturn the 5th Circuit’s decision. “There is no respectable way to treat the challenged Texas regulations as constitutional under the ‘undue burden’ standard,” Tribe said.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Justice Antonin Scalia's untimely passing has deprived us of a great legal mind. But the justice leaves behind a remarkable legacy—even if not quite the one he might have sought. He once said, only partly in jest, that he preferred a “dead” to a “living” Constitution: for him, the whole purpose of a Constitution was to nail things down so they would last—to “curtail judicial caprice” by preventing judges, himself included, from having their way with the law rather than doing the people’s bidding as expressed in binding rules. Yet Scalia managed, sometimes despite himself, to bring our Constitution—and the project of interpreting it—to life more deeply than have many whose overt ambition was to espouse a “living” Constitution.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: Suffice it to say that in spite of our disagreements, I invariably found Justice Scalia’s thinking and prodding to be brilliantly generative of important insights into the way law and legal interpretation ought to proceed. Even though I debated the justice repeatedly – both in academic settings, like my response to his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University (resulting in his 1997 book, A Matter of Interpretation), and in oral arguments at the Supreme Court, where I appeared before him and his colleagues dozens of times over the course of his 30-year tenure – I never ceased to enjoy the encounters immensely and never failed to benefit hugely from them, even when his inherent advantage left a bittersweet aftertaste. He was, after all, a U.S. Supreme Court justice and wielded a vote on that august tribunal and great influence within it, while I was a mere scholar and advocate.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D - Ct., and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe join Chris Matthews to talk about the GOP's vow to block an Obama SCOTUS pick.

“Nino was memorably smart, gregarious, funny, playful — a good pal — as well as plainly serious about his studies,” recalled Frank Michelman, the Robert Walmsley University Professor emeritus at Harvard, whose friendship with Scalia began in 1957 when they entered HLS together. The two shared an office while working on the Law Review. “We talked about everything that came along, and I had no inkling then of differences between us over matters legal or political that developed or became apparent later.

Harvard Law School affiliates remembered alumnus and Supreme Court Justice Antonin G. Scalia, who died Saturday at age 79, for his vibrant, fiery personality and his substantial contributions to United States law. “Justice Scalia will be remembered as one of the most influential jurists in American history,” Law School Dean Martha L. Minow wrote in a statement. ...  Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who knew Scalia personally, often found himself squaring off against the justice. Dershowitz said. “I disagree with almost all of his opinions, but I found him to be a formidable intellectual adversary.”....Law professor Charles Fried, who has written extensively on Scalia’s judicial stances, wrote in an email, “I knew him in so many ways over so many years. I am very sad about this great man's death.”...Law professor Richard Lazarus penned an op-ed in the Harvard Law Record extolling Scalia’s contributions to the art of oral argument. In a Bloomberg View piece, columnist and Law professor Noah R. Feldman wrote, “Antonin Scalia will go down as one of the greatest justices in U.S. Supreme Court history -- and one of the worst.” Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe commented in Politico Magazine, “To say that Scalia will be missed is an understatement.”

Justice Antonin Scalia’s death will complicate the work of the Supreme Court’s eight remaining justices for the rest of the court’s term, probably change the outcomes of some major cases and, for the most part, amplify the power of its four-member liberal wing. ...“Justice Scalia’s sad and untimely death will cast a pall over the entire term and a shadow over the court as a whole at least until a successor is nominated and confirmed,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard. ...“No less than the viability of the historic climate change agreement reached in Paris may well be in peril,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard. “And without Justice Scalia’s vote, that stay would have been denied.”

A stunning development for the U.S. Supreme Court this weekend, with news that Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead in his room at a luxury hunting resort near the Mexican border in Texas.He was 79. Natural causes, says a local judge. Scalia was the fiery leader of the conservative wing of the court, where frequent 5-4 decisions make any change of membership hugely consequential.President Obama says he will nominate a successor. Republicans say, “Don’t.”  This hour On Point, after Scalia. ... Laurence Tribe, professor of Constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Author, with Joshua Matz, of the book “Uncertain Justice,” among many others.