Laurence Tribe

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.

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."

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.”

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."

An op-ed by Michael Dorf: This article was first published on the Supreme Court of the United States site. Dissenting in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Chief Justice William Rehnquist claimed that the controlling joint opinion of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter rejected two key features of Roe v. Wade: Abortion was no longer a “fundamental right” and abortion restrictions were no longer subject to strict scrutiny, the late chief justice said. ...Nonetheless, Laurence Tribe is almost certainly correct in reading Lawrence as protecting a fundamental right under a slightly different name. As he explained shortly after the decision, the Lawrence Court cited prior fundamental rights rulings and even “invoked the talismanic verbal formula of substantive due process but did so by putting the key words in one unusual sequence or another.”

Ted Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother. Does the Constitution bar him from the presidency? Donald Trump has raised the issue in their campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. ...  The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on the meaning of the phrase. But Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe is among many scholars who say the better view is that a “natural born citizen” is anyone who was a U.S. citizen at birth and doesn’t need to be naturalized. Former solicitors general Neal Katyal and Paul Clement agreed with Tribe’s view in a March 2015 article for Harvard Law Review Forum.

Donald Trump says questions about whether Ted Cruz is eligible to be President of the United States could become a “big problem” for the Canadian-born Republican candidate. But among legal scholars, there’s a consensus: He’s eligible to occupy the Oval Office...Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told ABC News that Trump's alternative definition would mean that only citizens born in the United States would be eligible. “My own view as a constitutional scholar is that the better view -- the one most consistent with the entire Constitution -- is the broader definition, according to which Cruz would be eligible,” he said, including anyone who is a U.S. citizen at birth and doesn’t need to be naturalized.

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to consider whether California should do more to find the rightful owners of $8 billion in “unclaimed” bank, investment and retirement funds before seizing the accounts and pocketing the money. For 15 years, Sacramento attorney William W. Palmer has been fighting to force changes in California’s Unclaimed Property Law, which last year contributed nearly $450 million to state coffers. Palmer won several legal rounds early on, but in March, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed his latest challenge. With the help of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, Palmer appealed to the high court, calling the California program “a recipe for abuse.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. Earlier Tuesday, in a deeply moving speech that brought many, including the President himself, to tears, President Obama unveiled several executive actions intended to curtail the prevalence of gun violence in our nation. Beyond the concrete actions he described, he may have hoped to educate and persuade the public, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about the "fierce urgency of now." Most Americans will recognize the common-sense steps announced today cannot prevent all gun abuse but will still welcome them as ways of reducing the continuing scourge of gun violence in this country. Most but not all...But if we take the time to examine exactly what President Obama is proposing, a crucial step that these critics seem to have skipped, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the measures he has outlined are well within his legal authority.

...Coal needs all the friends it can get. The industry is under siege from federal regulation, most recently Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which went into effect on Oct. 23 and seeks to reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030. Consumers and activists, meanwhile, are persuading utilities to close aging coal-fired power plants. With funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has helped shut down more than 220 coal facilities over the past five years...Whitfield’s star witness was the well-known law professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who’s been retained by Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal company, to advocate against the EPA proposal. Arguing that the Obama administration was infringing on state authority, Tribe compared the Clean Power Plan to “burning the Constitution.” “If I thought the case was a close one, I wouldn’t have taken it on,” Tribe says. “If I’m proven right on the law, then lots of time, money, and jobs will have been lost pursuing an important goal in an unlawful way.”

Donald Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering the United States has been widely derided as discriminatory, hateful and unworkable - never mind illegal. Many legal experts have said it's almost certainly unconstitutional. According to several scholars surveyed by MSNBC, while foreign citizens do enjoy fewer rights than Americans, it is still illegal for the government to use a religious test on foreigners. The Constitution's "bar against declaring an official religion" would apply to discrimination against non-citizens, argues Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

During a speech to a conservative crowd in Iowa this month, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz leveled a heavy charge against his colleagues across the aisle in the U.S. Senate. Democrats, he said, attempted to eliminate Americans’ right to free speech with a proposed constitutional amendment last fall...“I have read the amendment carefully. It’s about raising and spending money in political campaigns — nothing more,” Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe told us in an email. “It has no effect at all on freedom of the press, freedom of assembly or peaceful protest. It does not allow the government to punish people for speaking their minds.” Tribe also noted that he had Cruz, a Harvard Law graduate, in class. “Ted Cruz earned an A in my constitutional law course at Harvard, and I am a tough grader!” Tribe said. “I’m confident Ted knows his statement is false. No lawyer or student who can read English believes what Ted Cruz claimed to believe.”

Boston-area universities are closely watching a Supreme Court case that could derail the use of race in admissions, a practice that several universities, including Harvard and MIT, say is fundamental to creating a diverse student body....a strong ruling one way or the other would create a “powerful atmospheric and cultural impact” on private schools, said Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Tribe. “Then the impact on privates would be indirect but massive,” Tribe said, but he explained that a ruling striking down race-based affirmative action is unlikely. Another legal analyst said a ruling against affirmative action would be a “body blow” to the many recent efforts to increase diversity. “The events of the past two or three years have made it clear that we have to be proactive about addressing equal opportunity and addressing racial attitudes,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.