Laurence Tribe

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.

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.”