Laurence Tribe

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.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died while on a trip to the Big Bend area of Texas, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. The longtime conservative jurist, known for an acerbic wit and occasionally biting opinions and dissents, was 79. Below are some early reactions to the news from the legal world: Laurence Tribe, professor at Harvard Law School: I’m still in shock, but one thing I can say is that I liked the Justice personally and greatly admired his contribution to our legal system even when I disagreed profoundly with his views.

Donald Trump continued to push the contentious issue of Ted Cruz’s presidential eligibility on Friday, threatening that he has legal standing to sue Cruz for not being a “natural born citizen.” ...Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said Trump’s standing is plausible but not legally guaranteed. “Its plausibility gets greater the closer we get to the point where it’s clear that Cruz himself (and not Cruz together with Bush, Kasich, Rubio, and perhaps others) is the real obstacle to Trump’s nomination and thus a clear source of concrete injury to Trump’s prospects for the Republican presidential nomination,” Tribe said in an email.

Before he died Saturday at age 79, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the longest-serving member of the current court, a towering figure in the legal community who now leaves a historic legacy. That’s how he’s being remembered. But just what was that legacy, exactly? ... That’s the portrait that emerges here from the 19 top legal thinkersPolitico Magazine asked to reflect on his life and death. ...Laurence H. Tribe ...Noah Feldman,

However worrying Tuesday was for the success of xenophobic politics in America, it might have been more worrying for the planet’s climate. In the early evening, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the implementation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations which would limit greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector. ...The idea wasn’t for naught. Coal stocks tanked over the last year, and many of the largest American coal companies have filed for bankruptcy. In fact, opponents of the plan cited this exact effect in their brief: The “EPA hopes that, by the time the judiciary adjudicates the legality of the Power Plan, the judicial action will come too late to make much if any practical difference,” said one brief from the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. He called the plan a “targeted attack on the coal industry.”

With his surprising victory in the Iowa caucuses last Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz solidified his status near the top of the GOP field. But in the background, the controversy over his birthplace and his eligibility for the nation’s highest office simmered on. At the forum “Is Ted Cruz Eligible to Be President?” held Friday at Wasserstein Hall in Harvard Law School (HLS), two constitutional scholars debated whether Cruz’s birth in Calgary, Alberta, to a Cuban father and an American mother disqualifies him to serve as president. Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, who teaches at HLS, argued that Cruz is ineligible to hold the presidency, using what he called Cruz’s own strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Two legal scholars squared off in a public debate on Friday to settle whether Republican Ted Cruz is eligible to become president. Spoiler alert: They didn't settle it. But the debate at Harvard Law School underscored that conflicting interpretations of the U.S. Constitution can produce different answers. The question has been in the national spotlight since Republican rival Donald Trump suggested that Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother, isn't legally qualified to be president. Much of the debate weighed whether Cruz is a natural born citizen, a requirement under the Constitution to become president that the document never defines. Harvard professor Larry Tribe argued that, based on legal principles from the country's early history, only those born on U.S. soil can be considered natural born citizens. Granting that status to Cruz, then, "is at odds with the text, the structure and the founding history of the Constitution," said Tribe, who once taught Cruz as a Harvard law student.

The Illinois Board of Elections rules Ted Cruz is a “natural born citizen” because his mother was a U.S. citizen and eligible to be on the ballot. Harvard Law's Laurence Tribe explains why “the Illinois Board of Elections doesn’t know what it's talking about.

As the 2016 election season ramps up, Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 finds himself at the center of a political firestorm. Over the past month, Republican presidential hopeful and Law School graduate Ted Cruz denounced his former constitutional law professor Tribe as “a left-wing judicial activist” while speaking in a mid-January Republican debate, while rival candidate Donald J. Trump has tweeted and debated in support of Tribe...Tribe said he is not particularly invested in the question of natural born citizenship. Rather, Tribe said, his main interest is in “the Constitution and my sense of how dangerous it is when people play fast and loose with it in order to further their political positions.”

After he left Wall Street to enter politics eight years ago, Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, began fielding the occasional question of when he intended to run for president. “It has come up in jest any number of times,” said Mr. Himes, who always has his answer ready. “There could be constitutional questions.” Mr. Himes, you see, was born in Peru in 1966 while his father worked for the Ford Foundation. That makes him one of at least 17 current members of Congress who, because of their birth outside the United States, could run afoul of the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” presidential requirement should they try to relocate down Pennsylvania Avenue...Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar, believes the “natural born” provision has outlived its original intent considering that the redcoats are no longer coming. “The worry that George III might come over and exert undue Germanic or British influence is no longer a threat,” said Mr. Tribe, referring to a motivating fear of the founding fathers. “There is no defense now for retaining the clause in the Constitution. It really needs to be removed.”

In two of Ted Cruz’s signature legal briefs before the supreme court, he cited the liberal law professor whom Donald Trump has invoked in questioning Cruz’s eligibility to be president. As Texas solicitor general, Cruz cited Harvard professor Laurence Tribe as “a prominent commentator” in his brief for Medellin v Texas, a case the senator invariably mentions on the stump. In Thursday night’s Republican debate, under fire from Trump, Cruz changed his tune about Tribe, who taught him constitutional law at Harvard, calling him “a leftwing judicial activist, [a] Harvard law professor who was Al Gore’s lawyer in Bush v Gore … a major Hillary Clinton supporter”...Cruz also cited Tribe in his brief for District of Columbia v Heller, a landmark 2008 case in which the court held that the second amendment provided for an individual right to bear arms...“Apparently Senator Cruz doesn’t think I’m too far left for him to cite me in his supreme court brief on behalf of 31 states as a principal authority on constitutional interpretation – when it suits his purposes,” said Tribe. “Somehow I don’t feel particularly complimented.”

The argument about Ted Cruz’s birth and eligibility to be president has become a major fight on the campaign trail between Donald Trump, Cruz and a prominent constitutional scholar from Harvard...Cruz says this is all settled law, but Harvard’s Laurence Tribe disagrees. “It clearly is not settled law,” Tribe said in recent an interview. Tribe brings an interesting perspective to this story. He obviously knows a lot about the law, but he also knows a lot about Cruz — because back in the mid-1980s, Tribe taught constitutional law to Cruz. “He was very colorful,” Tribe recalled. “He took me on all the time, always had his hand up, he always wanted to disagree. And he got an A, and there weren’t that many As in a class of 150 or so.”

The Founding Fathers’ insistence that the presidency be limited to “natural born citizens” was based on their openly expressed fear that “foreigners were disloyal,” as law professor Malinda L. Seymore has written...Harvard Law Prof. Laurence Tribe, who Trump quoted during the debate Thursday night as raising “serious questions” about Cruz’s eligibility, said in response to an email from the Post after the debate that the answer depends on one’s approach to interpreting the Constitution. “The more of a genuine ‘originalist’ someone (like Cruz) is, the harder it becomes to resolve that ‘serious question’ in Cruz’s favor. The more of a ‘living constitutionalist’ someone (like me) is, the easier it becomes to conclude that ‘natural born citizen’ has gradually acquired the broader meaning on which Cruz necessarily relies.”

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been busy combatting claims that his Canadian birth makes him ineligible for the presidency, but one Harvard professor is arguing that Cruz’s own logic could be his next opponent in the debate. Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor who once taught Cruz as his student, called the senator a “fair weather originalist” in a Boston Globe op-ed, noting that Cruz has trumpeted his views of a strict interpretation of the Constitution on the campaign trail—except when it comes to the question of his citizenship and potential to run for president...Tribe, who said in the op-ed that he disagreed with Cruz’s views while teaching him at Harvard but “enjoyed jousting with him,” told Boston.com that he hesitated before taking his opinion to the Globe, waiting longer than he would have to write about a stranger. “I usually do all I can ethically do to help my former students, including those whose views about how the Constitution should be interpreted and who should have the last word on constitutional questions I find it personally tough to swallow,” he said in an email, also noting that he’s supported past students who had views that conflicted with his own.

Calling him a "fair weather originalist" and accusing him of "constitutional hypocrisy," Ted Cruz's former law school professor is arguing that the Texas senator's own legal philosophy disqualifies him from serving as president. Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard whose students include President Barack Obama and Supreme Court justices John Roberts and Elena Kagan, hammered Cruz over questions about his presidential eligibility because of his birth in Canada, which have been raised by Donald Trump and caused headaches for the Calgary-born Texas senator in the Republican primary. Appearing on "Anderson Cooper 360" Monday night, Tribe slammed Cruz for his "constitutional hypocrisy."

After brushing off Donald Trump’s questions about his U.S. citizenship for a week, the Ted Cruz campaign on Tuesday began taking the issue of his Canadian birth seriously. Mr. Cruz’s campaign circulated a document accusing Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, whom Mr. Trump cited as the source of uncertainty about the Texas senator’s eligibility to be president, of “flip-flopping on questions of natural born citizenship.” The Cruz campaign’s attack on Mr. Tribe, a Harvard Law School constitutional law professor who once taught Barack Obama and worked for his 2008 presidential campaign, comes one week after Mr. Trump began publicly questioning whether Mr. Cruz is, as the Constitution requires of presidents, a “natural born citizen.”...“The Cruz effort to challenge my consistency and my motives is a sign of desperation, not at all an embarrassment to me,” Mr. Tribe said. “The real significance of this is the way he uses constitutional law as a kind of weather vane,” Mr. Tribe said. Mr. Cruz’s position, Mr. Tribe said, “is a progressive, flexible view of that clause.”

Trump is quoting from Lawrence's newsmaking interview on Ted Cruz's presidential eligibility with Harvard Law professor and constitutional expert Laurence Tribe. Tribe returns to respond to Trump quoting him and to talk more about his former law student.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. There’s more than meets the eye in the ongoing dustup over whether Ted Cruz is eligible to serve as president, which under the Constitution comes down to whether he’s a “natural born citizen” despite his 1970 Canadian birth. Senator Cruz contends his eligibility is “settled” by naturalization laws Congress enacted long ago. But those laws didn’t address, much less resolve, the matter of presidential eligibility, and no Supreme Court decision in the past two centuries has ever done so. In truth, the constitutional definition of a “natural born citizen” is completely unsettled, as the most careful scholarship on the question has concluded. Needless to say, Cruz would never take Donald Trump’s advice to ask a court whether the Cruz definition is correct, because that would in effect confess doubt where Cruz claims there is certainty.