Laurence Tribe

Call this the tale of two different sets of state attorneys general: one group represents coal producing and consuming states and the other speaks for states that adversely affected by those who burn coal. While it’s all playing out in the nation’s legal arenas, the efforts are surely political. After all, the office of attorney general is known as the “aspiring governors.”  ,,, “The absence of EPA legal authority in this case makes the Clean Power Plan, quite literally, a ‘power grab,’” says Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, in testimony before Congress last year.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. A one-line opinion. That's what the Supreme Court gave us this week, in what many expected to be one of the biggest cases of the year. At stake in Freidrichs v. California Teachers Association was the ability of public-sector unions to collect fees from non-joiners unwilling to pay for the unions' collective bargaining efforts. Some thought the fate of the American labor movement hinged on the outcome. The court had mountains of materials to consider. But it said only this: "The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court." If the Republican Senate keeps stonewalling Judge Merrick Garland's nomination, pretending that it can discharge its advice and consent duty by doing nothing, get used to hearing that sentence. This year, contraception, abortion, voting rights, religious freedom and affirmative action are on the court's docket. Next year and beyond we can expect cases on guns, campaign finance and the balance between security and privacy. But an incomplete court will deadlock 4-4 on many of these issues.

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. In nearly five decades teaching law, I’ve been lucky enough to know many Supreme Court justices. I’ve counted them among my friends, colleagues, students, and research assistants. I’ve seen that success on the court requires diverse traits: deep knowledge of the law, humility about the judicial role, an understanding of and concern for law’s real-world impact, and the ability to build coalitions on the bench. Having known Chief Judge Merrick Garland for over 40 years, I’m confident he possesses all these qualities and more. He will be among our nation’s finest justices, and I strongly encourage the Senate to end its obstructionism and confirm him to the court.

An article by Laurence Tribe. Suppose that Trump continues to rack up delegates in the Republican primaries but resistance to his candidacy is growing in the party’s barely surviving establishment. At the Republican convention—to be held 18-21st July in Cleveland, Ohio, to choose that party’s presidential nominee—not all state delegates are obliged by the rules to vote for the candidate who won their state’s primary. Moreover, the selection of those delegates is also an internal party matter—and many in the Republican Party are wary of Trump. Thus, Trump could win the largest number of votes in the Republican primary process, but still not obtain the party’s nomination to run for President. Political commentators are speculating about a contested Republican convention between Trump and a Republican establishment favourite like John Kasich, the Governor of Ohio, or even Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a more doctrinaire conservative than the relatively unpredictable Trump. All sorts of procedural gambits could be deployed at the convention in a pitched battle to determine the party’s nominee.

The intense political wrangling over Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court has overshadowed the traditional purpose of Senate confirmation — a serious look at the career and life of the contender...But who is Merrick Garland, and how did he come to be the kind of judge selected to navigate this unprecedented confirmation fight? Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has unique experience to answer the question. He taught both Garland and Obama when they were students at the prestigious school. He continues to advise the White House on legal issues. Tribe discussed Garland's nomination with MSNBC.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and former teacher of Merrick Garland, discusses Garland’s record and his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Obama. He spoke with June Grasso and Michael Best on Bloomberg Radio’s “Bloomberg Law.”

Judge Merrick B. Garland, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, has achieved a rare distinction in a polarized era. He has sat on a prominent appeals court for almost two decades, participated in thousands of cases, and yet earned praise from across the political spectrum...Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said Judge Garland’s dissenting opinion was “particularly admirable.” “That dissent is a fine example of an opinion that combines impeccable legal analysis with a deep sense of humanity,” he said.

President Obama has selected moderate federal appellate judge Merrick Garland to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by last month’s sudden passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, the White House has confirmed, setting up an epic battle with Republicans who have vowed not to hold a vote on any nominee. ..."Judge Garland is a brilliant jurist whom I've admired ever since he was my constitutional law student," Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe, a foremost scholar on constitutional law who had Garland as a student, told the Herald in an email this morning. "His modesty, humility, and moderation make him a particularly suitable choice for these divided times."

Gearing up for what will likely be a major political battle, on Wednesday President Obama, J.D. ’91, nominated Merrick B. Garland ’74, J.D. ’77, to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of influential Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, L.L.B. ’60, last month....Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, discussed the nomination with the Gazette via email, along with the upcoming clash between the Obama administration and the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee, many of whose members want the next president to fill the court seat...TRIBE: Merrick Garland is a brilliant jurist whom I’ve known well and admired greatly ever since he was my student in advanced constitutional law in 1975-76.

Be wary of any promises from Republican presidential candidates to abolish federal entities such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department, legal scholars told Bloomberg BNA, because they will not come true...“This is just red meat to their supporters, of course, and cannot be unilaterally accomplished,” Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg BNA. “Presidents can ask Congress for skeletal agency budgets, try to stymie or slow agency work or control them and weaken regulation through centralized White House review, but they cannot eliminate agencies or zero out budgets by fiat, which is what these candidates are promising.” ...Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor and legal scholar, told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail that the agency's origins are “legally irrelevant” to whether it could now be abolished. “The fact that an executive order by President Nixon preceded the Acts of Congress constituting the current EPA, delegating regulatory powers to that agency, authorizing its expenditures and appropriating the funds in its budget doesn't make it vulnerable to unilateral presidential abolition,” Tribe said.

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.”