Laurence Tribe

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe: The Supreme Court has rebuffed yet another attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act. In King v. Burwell, the challengers argued not that the Constitution prohibited the ACA, but that the law’s own text made one of its key reforms ineffective and indeed perverse. Applying a strong dose of common sense to reject this argument, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a six-justice majority, handed the people and the Congress that represents them a resounding victory.

Two legal heavyweights are poised for battle over just how far the city of Berkeley, Calif. can go in compelling speech by mobile phone retailers...In the other corner, representing Berkeley, is Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig...‘‘I know both Ted Olson and Larry Lessig well and think extremely well of them both. Both of them are extremely smart, imaginative lawyers who are bound to do excellent work in this lawsuit,’’ Laurence Tribe, another constitutional law professor who works with Lessig at Harvard, told Bloomberg BNA.

In the fall of 1987, a package arrived on the desk of Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard law professor who had just lost a Supreme Court case on gay rights. It contained the legal opinions of Anthony M. Kennedy, a strait-laced, conservative Republican jurist from Sacramento who hardly seemed sympathetic to that cause. The package was sent by one of the most influential men in the California capital then, Gordon Schaber, a law school dean who had enlisted a young Mr. Kennedy to teach night classes and nurtured his career. Now Mr. Schaber was angling for President Ronald Reagan to elevate his friend to the Supreme Court — and he wanted the Harvard professor’s support. “Gordon Schaber said that Tony Kennedy was entirely comfortable with gay friends,” said Professor Tribe, who later testified to urge the Senate to confirm Justice Kennedy. “He said he never regarded them as inferior in any way or as people who should be ostracized, and I did think that was a good signal of where he was on these matters.” Now, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether to grant a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy, a onetime altar boy, has emerged as an unlikely gay rights icon. At 78, he has advanced legal equality for gays more than any other American jurist, making his friend Mr. Schaber, who died in 1997 — and who was, many who knew him believe, a closeted gay man — look prescient.

On Monday, just as the Supreme Court handed Barack Obama a resounding victory in a turf battle with Congress over foreign affairs, the president criticised the justices at a press conference in Krün, Germany, site of the G7 summit. In response to a reporter’s question about King v Burwell, the challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) set to be decided this month, Mr Obama said it would take a “twisted interpretation of four words in...a couple-thousand-page piece of legislation” for the court to eliminate tax subsidies for health insurance in the 34 states where the federal government operates health-care exchanges..." These comments drew some criticism even from supporters of the president. Mr Obama’s old law-school professor, Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, said “presidents should generally refrain from commenting on pending cases during the process of judicial deliberation.”

More than a year after the fight for legal personhood for the research chimpanzees Hercules and Leo, the apes and their lawyers got their day in court. At a hearing in Manhattan on Wednesday, a judge heard arguments in the landmark lawsuit against Stony Brook University, with a decision expected later this summer. At stake: the question of whether only human beings deserve human rights. ...In the other appeals court decision, judges declared that chimps are not legal persons because they can’t fulfill duties to human society. But that rationale arguably denies personhood to young children and mentally incapacitated individuals, as several high-profile legal scholars, including Constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe, pointed out. He filed a brief on behalf of the Nonhuman Rights Project, saying the court “reached its conclusion on the basis of a fundamentally flawed definition of legal personhood.”

Elizabeth Warren is trying to kill President Barack Obama’s trade agenda by raising the specter that foreign companies could use an investor-friendly arbitration system to circumvent the U.S. court system...In the 2000 case, Loewen Group filed its dispute against the U.S. government after suffering an expensive legal setback in a business lawsuit in Mississippi. Loewen brought in some big legal guns, including Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, an Obama mentor who is now siding with Warren against the president’s trade deal...Meanwhile, Tribe submitted testimony on Loewen’s behalf calling the Mississippi court decisions a travesty and arguing that an ISDS tribunal should decide the claim because no other avenues were available. Tribe’s participation is notable because of a letter he cosigned last month to House and Senate leaders expressing “grave concern about a document we have not been able to see,” referring to the possibility that the Asia-Pacific trade deal still under negotiation could include ISDS provisions.

Texas’ latest proposal to restrict abortion rights is likely to land the state back in court, constitutional law experts say. A bill offered by Rep. Geanie Morrison, R-Victoria, would require all women to show government identification to get an abortion and add restrictions to the legal process minors use to get an abortion without parental consent. The ID provision in particular is unprecedented and could be seen as an undue barrier to the procedure, legal experts say...“Describing the proposed bill … as a loophole-closing measure is like describing a hangman’s noose as a loophole-closing device,” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said in an email Tuesday. “No objective court could deny that the bill’s obvious purpose and effect are to get around the Supreme Court’s protections of reproductive liberty.”

In her quarrel with President Barack Obama over trade legislation, Elizabeth Warren has got the law on her side. The Massachusetts senator has warned fellow Democrats that a fast-track trade bill now in Congress could undo U.S. laws such as the Dodd-Frank banking regulations later. A number of constitutional scholars and other legal experts say she’s right...On Warren’s side: One of the nation’s preeminent constitutional law scholars, Laurence Tribe of Harvard University, who counts Obama as a former student. “Any act of Congress or duly ratified treaty overrides any contrary prior federal legislation,” he said in an e-mail.

A rift widened between President Barack Obama and liberal Democrats in Congress over trade as he and Senator Elizabeth Warren renewed their gripes a day before a key vote on a potential deal with Pacific nations....As a matter of law, Warren is correct that a trade deal approved under fast track could override U.S. laws, including Dodd-Frank, though a future president and Congress would have to approve the pact, said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. “Any duly ratified treaty overrides any contrary prior federal legislation,” Tribe said.

An op-ed by Elizabeth Warren and Rosa DeLauro. Congress is in an intense debate over trade bills that will shape the course of the US economy for decades. Much of this debate has been characterized as a fight over whether international trade itself creates or destroys American jobs. There is, however, another major concern — that modern “trade” agreements are often less about trade and more about giant multinational corporations finding new ways to rig the economic system to benefit themselves...Economist Joe Stiglitz, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, and others recently noted that “the threat and expense of ISDS proceedings have forced nations to abandon important public policies” and that “laws and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at risk in a process insulated from democratic input.”

With his time in office waning, President Barack Obama is speaking out on race and poverty in increasingly blunt terms as violent protests in U.S. cities highlight the unrealized promise of his election....“I must confess to having shared that great optimism, especially because I had been so impressed personally with Barack Obama when he was my student and research assistant,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University."

Columbia law professor Tim Wu smarmily insinuates on the New Yorker’s website today that if colleagues like Harvard’s Laurence Tribe are going to speak on behalf of huge corporations like Peabody Energy in its lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, instead of defending “underrepresented” clients whose views otherwise “would not be heard,” then universities ought to rethink their longstanding policy of letting faculty lawyers work for private clients. It is deliciously self-satirical that Wu also directs a Columbia Journalism School First Amendment center as well, for the real purpose of his piece seems less a complaint about the wealth of Tribe’s client than an effort, however anemic, to silence Tribe’s defense of constitutional views that Wu dislikes. Free speech, indeed.

The Office of Attorney General Maura Healey will on Thursday defend the constitutionality of a state statute that makes it a crime to knowingly lie in political campaign material — opposing civil liberties advocates, newspaper publishers, and a trend in judicial rulings that concludes such laws can have a chilling effect on free speech....Laurence H. Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard, noted that while an attorney general may decline to defend a law, “in sufficiently extreme cases,” or when directed by the president as Holder was, Tribe said “an independently elected state AG like AG Healey might be regarded as having less discretion to take such a stance.”

What is going on with Laurence Tribe, professor at Harvard Law School, mentor to Barack Obama, and one of the most venerated legal scholars in the country? Over the past month, he has come under widespread and sometimes vicious attack. He has been called a sellout and a traitor whose arguments are “baseless” and “far-fetched” by professors at New York University, Harvard, and Georgetown. Most of the specific criticism arises from his representation of Peabody Energy, a coal company, in its effort to squash the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of carbon emissions. Of course, it is natural, and part of the job of an academic, to have people disagree with you. But there is a more serious question here: Is Tribe being unfairly indicted for a deviation from liberal orthodoxy, or has he taken steps that justifiably undermine his credibility as a scholar?

The fatal shootings in Garland, Texas, of two extremist gunmen as they attacked an anti-Islamist meeting was a vivid reminder of the virtually unique protections afforded by the US constitution to free speech, no matter how hate-filled or provocative, according to prominent first amendment experts...Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe said the Garland attack illustrated a major difference in free speech law between the US and almost every other country in the world. “Most other nations recognize a category of hateful speech that is likely to trigger outrage and even retaliation, but the first amendment has for many decades been interpreted to allow speakers like Pamela Geller to spread their disturbing messages to the world at large,” Tribe said.

Senator Ted Cruz, who wants to be the Republican Party's lead crusader against gay marriage, ducked the opportunity to play a critical role in turning back the movement in its infancy. In 2003, the year Cruz became Texas's top government litigator, the state lost a crucial case as the U.S. Supreme Court decided that state laws banning homosexual sex as illegal sodomy were unconstitutional. The decision in Lawrence v. Texas paved the way for the court's consideration of gay marriage...Cruz has consistently opposed gay rights and defended religious liberty laws, dating to his days as a Harvard University law student. One of his professors, Laurence Tribe, had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of overturning a Georgia law deeming gay sex as illegal sodomy and lost. Tribe used the 1986 case as a discussion point in his class, encouraging students to voice their opinions on the ruling. Most, he said, "seemed to share the hope" that it would eventually be overruled. Cruz was a notable exception. "I can't truthfully say I recall any specific comment Ted made about why sexual intimacies in private between consenting adults should be subject to government regulation," Tribe said. "But that was quite clearly his view."

They may not know it, and they most certainly will not be in attendance, but Hercules and Leo will have their day in court. A judge in Manhattan has ordered a hearing that will touch upon the continuing debate over whether caged chimpanzees can be considered “legal persons,” in the eyes of the law, and thus sue, with human help, for their freedom...Some legal experts, however, seemed to offer support for the idea that animals could file suit for their freedom. Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard Law School scholar, said he believed habeas corpus ought to be available to test the treatment and confinement of “other beings whose capacities are limited but who are potentially capable of bearing rights,” a category he contended ought to eventually include chimps like Hercules and Leo. Mr. Tribe added that Justice Jaffe’s decision was “a legally sound and suitably cautious step forward in the struggle to extend legal protections,” regardless of “whether or not we are yet ready to crown those others with the title of ‘human person.’ ”

How could constitutional scholar and Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe's involvement in last week's U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit hearing on the Clean Power Plan affect the future of the rule? During today's OnPoint, Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman, professors at Harvard Law, explain why they believe the government came out ahead during last week's federal court hearing. They also rebut Tribe's arguments against the constitutionality of the Power Plan.

Harold Koh, the former dean of Yale Law School, once railed against the Bush administration’s treatment of terrorism suspects, including deriding legal rationales laid out by a former student, John Yoo. After Yoo left the Bush team to return to teach at the University of California-Berkeley’s law school, he found himself a pariah, with many students unsuccessfully urging the school to drop him for policies they said justified torture. Now, Koh is the one finding himself under pressure at an academic institution for his legal reasoning on how to deal with terrorism suspects, in particular the rationales he laid out to justify the use of drone strikes while working for the Obama administration...The letter in support of Koh has more than 400 signatures, including those of several of Koh’s colleagues at Yale and other prominent names — conservative and liberal — from across the country, such as Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School and former U.S. solicitor general Ted Olson.