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Laurence Tribe

  • Legal World Reacts to the Death of Justice Scalia

    February 14, 2016

    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 Might Be Able to Sue Ted Cruz, Legal Experts Say

    February 14, 2016

    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.

  • How Antonin Scalia Changed America

    February 14, 2016

    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,

  • The Supreme Court’s Devastating Decision on Climate

    February 10, 2016

    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.”

  • Professor Laurence Tribe speaking at a podium

    Legal scholars debate Cruz’s eligibility to serve as president

    February 8, 2016

    In a debate hosted by the Harvard Federalist Society, two constitutional scholars—Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe and Professor Jack Balkin of Yale Law School—debated whether Cruz’s birth in Calgary, Alberta, to a Cuban father and an American mother disqualifies him to serve as president.

  • A question of citizenship

    February 8, 2016

    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.

  • Can Cruz legally be president? Ivy League scholars debate

    February 5, 2016

    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.

  • IL Elections Board: Cruz Eligible for 2016 (video)

    February 5, 2016

    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.

  • Law Prof. Laurence Tribe Comments on Ted Cruz’s Candidacy

    January 21, 2016

    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.”

  • It May Be Time to Resolve the Meaning of ‘Natural Born’

    January 18, 2016

    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.”

  • Ted Cruz cited professor at heart of citizenship spat in supreme court briefs

    January 18, 2016

    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.”

  • Questions About Citizenship Become A Major Irritant For Ted Cruz

    January 18, 2016

    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.”

  • Ted Cruz and that ‘natural born citizen’ requirement: What were the Founding Fathers afraid of?

    January 15, 2016

    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.”

  • Harvard professor says Ted Cruz’s own philosophy renders him ineligible for the presidency

    January 14, 2016

    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.

  • Cruz’s law professor on birther issue: His own legal philosophy disqualifies him

    January 13, 2016

    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."

  • Ted Cruz Fights Back on Issue of Birth and Citizenship

    January 13, 2016

    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.”

  • Donald Trump quotes ‘The Last Word’ (video)

    January 12, 2016

    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.

  • Constitutional Cruz control

    January 12, 2016

    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.

  • Texas governor joins Marco Rubio in call for new constitutional convention

    January 11, 2016

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday revealed his plans for a "convention of the states," the first in more than 200 years, as part of a larger effort to reshape the U.S. Constitution and expand states' rights...In an email to CNN, Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, expressed doubts over the viability of Abbott's plan. The process and protocol for gathering a "convention of the states" remains a mystery, he said, even to most experts. "Nobody knows exactly how we'd determine when a new convention must be called," or "whether distinct amendment calls could be combined to reach the requisite number of states," Tribe wrote, citing his own research. The role of the courts and Congress is also unclear and, as Tribe explained, despite arguments to the contrary, "there is no agreed-upon process for coming up with definitive answers to any of these unknowns," creating a sort of legal "black hole."

  • Harvard scholar: Ted Cruz’s citizenship, eligibility for president ‘unsettled’

    January 11, 2016

    The legal and constitutional issues around qualification for the presidency on grounds of US citizenship are “murky and unsettled”, according to the scholar cited by Donald Trump in his recent attacks on Ted Cruz. Trump has sought to cast doubt on whether the senator, who was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father, is a “natural-born US citizen”. In doing so he has referred to the work and words of Laurence Tribe, perhaps the most respected liberal law professor in the country. Tribe taught both Cruz and Barack Obama at Harvard Law School. He also advised Al Gore in the 2000 Florida recount and has advised Obama’s campaign organisation. “Despite Sen[ator] Cruz’s repeated statements that the legal/constitutional issues around whether he’s a natural-born citizen are clear and settled,” he told the Guardian by email, “the truth is that they’re murky and unsettled.”

  • Trump gives Cruz legal advice on citizenship

    January 8, 2016

    Donald Trump continues to raise questions about Ted Cruz's Constitutional eligibility to be president and even gave “advice” on how Cruz should address the issue. Lawrence asks Cruz's former Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, if the issue really is "settled law."