Laurence Tribe

The can of worms opened with a teasing tweet from @tribelaw, the Twitter account of Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. Tribe, a frequent social media critic of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, disclosed that Trump had called him for legal advice 20 years ago. Saying he kept his notes from the call and implying he might release them, the constitutional law scholar mused whether his discussion with Trump in 1996 would fall under the attorney-client privilege. (Tribe's tweet came in response to Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, who called Trump a blowhard — a charge with which Tribe appears to agree.)

A quarter century after the end of the cold war, Donald Trump has proposed restoring ideological tests for immigrants, a move that legal experts say raises a tangle of practical and even constitutional concerns. In a speech on Monday devoid of policy details or specifics, the Republican nominee called for the “extreme vetting” of immigrants, including a screening process to root out applicants who do not uphold “American values”. Laurence Tribe, a liberal constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said Trump’s proposal was “a nonstarter”. “The proposal ... is very deeply un-American, is probably unconstitutional, would almost certainly fail in Congress and is another example of Trump having no idea what he’s talking about,” he said. Restricting immigrants on the basis of ideology is anathema to American values, Tribe argues. Freedom of speech and religion are enshrined under the first amendment of the constitution and the enduring symbol of freedom is the Statue of Liberty welcoming weary immigrants to its shores.

Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim-American soldier who was killed in the Iraq War, accused Donald Trump of not reading the Constitution. Rep. Chris Collins, a Trump supporter, turned the claim around on Hillary Clinton. During an interview on MSNBC, Collins made assertions about Clinton’s views on the Constitution in the context of the Gold Star father’s Democratic National Convention speech. "He stood next to Hillary Clinton, who has already said she's going to wipe out the Second Amendment..."...We spoke to constitutional law experts Laurence Tribe from Harvard Law School and Matthew Steilen from the University at Buffalo about Collins' claim. In this case, they said executive actions and orders typically do not directly contradict the 10th Amendment.

Senator Claire McCaskill set off a legal debate today when she told MSNBC that Donald Trump should be investigated for potentially violating the Logan Act...Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law and former mentor to President Obama, sided with McCaskill on Twitter: Trump’s “jokes” inviting an adversary to wage cyberwar against the U.S. appear to violate the Logan Act and might even constitute treason. In a follow-up comment to Washingtonian, Tribe elaborated that, while the law has never been “formally interpreted” by the Supreme Court, “it obviously applies to Trump’s overt encouragement of Russian interference with this November’s presidential election.”

For Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, not only do Donald “Trump's "jokes" about Russia amount to "inviting an adversary to wage cyberwar against the U.S.," but they also "appear to violate the Logan Act and might even constitute treason,” he tweeted Thursday...The latest tweet from the liberal legal giant whose name has been floated as a Supreme Court pick comes after Trump and his campaign brushed aside the backlash over his remark. The Republican nominee himself telling Fox News that he was "being sarcastic." “Imagine what our 1st president would've said about a candidate inviting a foreign power to intrude into a US election for the 45th president,” Tribe previously tweeted Wednesday, adding that he “must have been hallucinating” at hearing Trump’s calls for Russian hackers to infiltrate Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A group of high-profile legal minds wants the Supreme Court to eliminate super-PACs, the advocacy groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash to praise and attack political candidates. But instead of asking the court to overturn the 2010 Supreme Court case that lifted many restraints on political spending, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, they plan to ask the justices to overturn a lower court decision that interpreted Citizens United to open the door to the super-PACs. The strategy is worth pursuing...Why attack SpeechNow instead of challenging Citizens United directly? The answer is subtle, and it reflects the legal expertise of the group, which includes my senior Harvard Law School colleague Laurence Tribe, the unquestioned master of the dark arts of shaping doctrine through litigation.

A powerhouse legal team representing a bipartisan group of congressional members and candidates is unleashing a new effort to overturn the case that birthed super PACs, part of a novel strategy to rein in the big money that has poured into campaigns since 2010. Their immediate target is not Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the polarizing decision handed down by the Supreme Court that year. Instead, they are going after a lesser-known case decided by U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit just two months later: SpeechNow.org v. FEC ...A team of attorneys including 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, are taking aim at SpeechNow.org with a new complaint they hope will reach the Supreme Court before the 2020 elections. The thrust of their argument: The lower court erred in its interpretation of a line in the Citizens United decision, a mistake that unleashed a flood of money into elections that the Supreme Court never intended. “The situation left in place by SpeechNow.org is one that Congress never enacted and people would never support,” Tribe said. “The law permits a very severe limit on the amount an individual can give to someone’s campaign, but at the same time that could be evaded by giving millions to super PACs. . . . The Supreme Court never approved anything like that.”

In a landmark victory for Harvard and affirmative action supporters across the nation, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to race-conscious admissions policies in a 4-3 vote...Thursday’s ruling is a “decisive victory” for Harvard, Law professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 said, adding that the decision is “favorable to what Harvard has tried to do over the years to overcome racial stereotypes.”“Our affirmative action program and others like it will of course continue to be the targets of litigation, some of it well intended, but those creating and administering such programs will now be able to point to what amounts to a clear blueprint for their design and defense,” Tribe wrote in an email.

Many Massachusetts colleges and universities are pleased by Thursday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the use of race as a factor in college admissions. But that doesn't mean that the legal fight about race conscious admissions decisions is over. Perhaps the Massachusetts school most closely watching this case was Harvard University. It's facing a separate lawsuit alleging that its admissions policies discriminate against Asian Americans. Some say Thursday's high court ruling is going to affect that suit. "I can hear the death knell of that lawsuit," said Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. Tribe, who is advising the school on that suit, says the Supreme Court ruling bolsters Harvard's argument that race is one of several factors that schools should consider in admissions decisions.

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to a race-conscious admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin, handing supporters of affirmative action a major victory....Supporters of affirmative action hailed the decision as a landmark. “No decision since Brown v. Board of Education has been as important as Fisher will prove to be in the long history of racial inclusion and educational diversity,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, referring to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down segregated public schools.

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the University of Texas’s consideration of race in its admissions policy, handing a victory to supporters of affirmative action in a case closely watched by universities in Massachusetts and across the country...“The decision means that race-conscious affirmative action programs in higher education, like the one Harvard University has, for example, will be upheld as long as they follow the court’s guidelines of avoiding crude racial quotas,” and are finely tuned, said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. If the court had ruled the other way, he said, it could have ended any consideration given to race in college admissions. Instead, he said, the court “rendered a huge national reprieve for racial inclusion.”

Relieving fears at Harvard and elsewhere that it might strike down the use of race in admissions, the U.S. Supreme Court today upheld the University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s affirmative action program in the case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin...Paul professor of constitutional law Tomiko Brown-Nagin called the decision “a stunning win for the University and a reversal of fortune for affirmative action’s detractors.” Laurence Tribe, Loeb University Professor and professor of constitutional law, commented that, "Today’s decision in Fisher v. Texas means that race-conscious affirmative action programs in higher education will be upheld as long as they follow the Court's guidelines for avoiding crude racial quotas and for fine-tuning those programs over time on the basis of intelligently articulated educational philosophies targeting the many dimensions of diversity, as Harvard’s programs of affirmative action have taken great care to do.

It’s as if they never heard the case at all. The supreme court’s 4-4 split Thursday in United States v Texas leaves in place a lower court’s ruling that blocked Barack Obama’s immigration plan. When the court is equally divided, no precedent is set and the lower court’s opinion stands...To avoid wasting time on something that might end up evenly split, Johnson said that he thinks the court “will avoid really important cases”...Laurence H Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, concurred in a recent public lecture. Tribe said, “Nobody wants to grant [a writ of certiorari] in the case where the court will just waste its precious time, where in the end it will be deadlocked.” If the court vacancy continues into next year, Tribe cautioned that it may appear that the justices are in agreement, but that may just be a result of accepting less controversial cases, and it will be hard to tell how many could have split 4-4. He said: “No one will be able to count how many there are, because it will be the dog that didn’t bark.”

If state Rep. Byron Rushing, a Democrat from Boston's South End, has his way, laws that criminalize adultery, vagrancy, fornication, sodomy, blasphemy, Communism, and more will soon be repealed...Getting rid of the outdated laws is low on the list of priorities currently being juggled by the Legislature, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told WGBH News. "The danger that such laws will be pulled out of the drawer and enforced against unwitting members of disadvantaged groups is often overlooked," Tribe said. "The effort to clean up and update outmoded and partly or wholly unconstitutional laws as Byron Rushing is doing remains an important one, not least because the presence of dead wood in our lawbooks contributes to a corrosive cynicism and a scofflaw attitude," Tribe said.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Scott Greytak. The Federal Election Commission, the federal agency charged with overseeing US elections and yet paralyzed by partisanship, will host a first-of-its-kind public forum Thursday on the threat posed by foreign-influenced corporations that spend on American elections. The meeting comes less than one month after the kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced it would make a $3.5 billion investment in Uber, the US-based ride-hailing service and ubiquitous election spender. Now, as the specter of foreign influence comes to haunt even our local elections, the government entity with the most to do — at a time when its power is declining — has put the issue squarely before the public-policymaking consciousness.

If there's one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on when it comes to guns, it's their proclaimed respect for the Second Amendment. Ah, but then there's the trickier matter of what they think those 27 words mean. Lawyers, scholars, judges, politicians and ordinary Americans have been puzzling over that question for much of two centuries...Harvard Law scholar Laurence Tribe says it's time for partisans to stop oversimplifying. Supporters of strong gun regulation act as if Supreme Court rulings affirming the right to bear arms were "just aberrations," he says, and opponents act like any regulation is a slippery slope to the day when "Big Brother will be breaking down our doors and taking away all our guns."

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe and Joshua Matz. With 24 cases still to decide this term and only eight justices to decide them, the Supreme Court has mustered all its resources to find (or manufacture) consensus. Many rulings — even those with lopsided majorities — hint strongly of compromise. So far, the justices have mostly decided not to decide, drafting narrow opinions that leave big questions unanswered. It is in vogue to treat this term as a one-off, yet another result of madhouse election-year politics. On that view, the court just needs to tread water a while longer. In the meantime, each of us can hope that justices who share our particular vision will end up with a majority. But when “exceptional” circumstances endure long enough, advance powerful political interests and are tolerated by the public, they can easily become the new normal.

ISPs wired and wireless have submitted a paper to the FCC by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe that says the commission's broadband privacy proposal threatens speech rights. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, CTIA and USTelecom commissioned the paper, which they submitted Friday, the deadline for initial comments in the proceeding. "The FCC’s proposed rules would violate the First Amendment," Tribe concluded. "At minimum, they raise a host of grave constitutional questions and should not be adopted." The FCC is proposing to require ISPs to get affirmative (opt in) permission from subs to share information with third parties in most instances, a requirement not placed on edge providers like Google and Facebook for their own data collection and monetizing. Tribe is a voice of experience on the CPNI (customer proprietary network information) issue, the groups point out, having successfully challenged the voice CPNI order in US West Communications, Inc. v. FCC. He says the FCC proposal clearly triggers First Amendment scrutiny and clearly does not fare well in that examination. "The proposal runs afoul of fundamental First Amendment limits on the FCC’s authority to regulate customer information," he said.

Donald Trump’s list of 11 potential Supreme Court nominees seemed intended to reassure some of longtime conservatives still jittery about his populist-fueled candidacy. However, what immediately caught the eye of many legal observers was the absence of many judges considered legal luminaries on the right. While Trump's list pulled in five judges from various state supreme courts, he passed over some of those long considered top contenders for any future Republican Supreme Court pick, like 6th Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton, D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh and former Solicitor General Paul Clement...“The missing names ... are even more interesting than the names on the list,“ said Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, once considered a top Supreme Court possibility for Democrats.

Conservative claims that Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland’s rulings prove he is anti-business are "silly" "nonsense," according to administrative law experts...“If you look at cases involving direct regulation by government agencies, his pattern of voting in those cases is entirely standard,” said Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School. “It’s the common approach because ever since the Chevron decision the idea has been that Congress can’t always address all of the details that arise in the regulatory state so they give a lot of leeway to expert agencies in deciding how best to carry out the underlying purpose that Congress had in enacting statutes. Therefore, the idea is when agencies resolve those ambiguities in ways that are at least rational and don’t cross any boundaries that are laid down, federal judges usually defer.”