Laurence Tribe

President Obama’s most far-reaching regulation to slow climate change will have its first day in court on Thursday, the beginning of what is expected to be a multiyear legal battle over the policy that Mr. Obama hopes to leave as his signature environmental achievement. ... Among the lawyers arguing on behalf of the coal companies is Laurence H. Tribe, a renowned Harvard scholar of constitutional law, who was also a mentor to Mr. Obama when he attended law school. Republicans who opposed the rule have cheered Mr. Tribe’s role in the case. Legal experts say it is also possible that the judges could throw the case out, since the rule has only been proposed and thus contains language that could change when released in the final form. “Is industry right that the agency lacks the authority to regulate? The challenge is extremely unusual, since the rule is proposed, and not final,” said Jody Freeman, the director of Harvard University’s environmental law program and a former senior counselor to Mr. Obama. “For a court to entertain that would go against decades and decades of precedent.”  

The environmental case being argued on Thursday in a federal appeals court in Washington is equal parts legal freak show and serious legal business. On the serious side, it is the latest attempt by fossil-fuel interests to embalm the Environmental Protection Agency and the Obama administration's climate plan. But it is the legal sideshow orchestrated by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe of Harvard that is unsettling to many environmental lawyers. ... Jody Freeman, another Harvard law professor, called the challenge’s timing "extremely unusual," and Harvard’s Richard Lazarus, who called the legislative history of the disputed clauses in the law "beyond novel" and "really bizarre." Both professors strongly disagree with Tribe’s arguments.  

A congressional drafting error and clunky phrase is putting a second of President Barack Obama’s signature endeavors in jeopardy. This time it’s climate change. Challengers to Obama’s policies are exploiting a law written 25 years ago in a lawsuit to derail Environmental Protection Agency rules designed to curb carbon emissions. The case, using a line of attack similar to one against his massive health-care overhaul, is set for a hearing Thursday in federal court. ...To add legal heft, coal producer Peabody Energy Corp. hired Laurence Tribe, Obama’s law professor and mentor at Harvard University, to help. Tribe, a leading liberal constitutional scholar, has argued 35 cases at the Supreme Court, including the 2000 election case for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore over Republican George W. Bush.

It's as if sportswriting has invaded the energy and environment beat. President Barack Obama’s actions on climate change are “sidestepping” or making an "end run” around Congress, critics and news accounts say – including some stories by this reporter. But that depiction, more applicable perhaps to a wide receiver than a Washington politician, is at best imprecise. And at worst, it's just plain false, some legal scholars contend...Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe – testifying opposite Revesz in a House hearing last month – went one further, accusing the administration of "burning the Constitution."...Others, however, argue that the Clean Air Act's language is “expansive,” in the words of Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus, writing in the Harvard Law Review in March 2013. “The relevant language has lain largely dormant for decades, but is now ripe for a presidential awakening,” Lazarus argued.

An op-ed by Alan M. Dershowitz, Neal K. Katyal, Theodore B. Olson and H. Jefferson Powell. Constitutional arguments stand or fall on their merits. That principle is as old as the Republic, but a recent debate suggests that it is worth restating. The issue is the constitutionality of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, with Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe arguing that the EPA’s proposed actions would violate constitutional principles of separation of powers and federalism, and might require just compensation payments to energy companies; his critics vigorously dispute each of Tribe’s claims. But it is not the substance of their disagreement that has caught our attention...The great Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1805 that in debate over “any political proposition,” an individual’s judgment will be greatly “influenced by the wishes, the affections, and the general theories of those by whom” it is to be discussed and decided. He might have added that less dignified, self-interested motives can be at play as well...we can and should emulate Marshall and draw a line between public critique, however vigorous, and the public invocation of private suspicions.

Republican Senator Rand Paul officially announced he's running for president this week, and he has pledged to get rid of the US Department of Education if he's elected. We reached out to famous Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe to find out whether Paul would have the Constitutional ability to shutter the DOE for good. The DOE was created in 1979 through the Department of Education Organization Act, which was passed by Congress, and Tribe told us that "it would of course require another Act of Congress to eliminate the United States Department of Education." "There is no Constitutional obstacle to the enactment of such a law," added Tribe, a legendary professor who counted President Barack Obama among his research assistants.

Laurence Tribe's days as a liberal icon are over for green groups and many environmental law professors. One of the country's best-known constitutional scholars, the Harvard law professor has made headlines for his two-fisted attack on President Obama's proposed greenhouse gas standards for power plants, a pillar of the administration's effort to combat climate change...In an email exchange about the outrage his recent comments have generated, Tribe said "strong criticism comes with the territory if you don't let your lawyering follow the political winds or be influenced by how it might affect your image. I've always done what I thought was right and let the chips fall where they may," he added. "I've never let the fact that my opinions might prove unpopular with many, including with some people who are my allies in many a political and legal fight, deter me from speaking my mind. As long as I (and those who know me best) don't doubt my integrity or my motives, I'm okay with the situation."

Laurence H. Tribe, the highly regarded liberal scholar of constitutional law, still speaks of President Obama as a proud teacher would of a star student. “He was one of the most amazing research assistants I’ve ever had,” Mr. Tribe said in a recent interview. Mr. Obama worked for him at Harvard Law School, where Mr. Tribe has taught for four decades...Which is why so many in the Obama administration and at Harvard are bewildered and angry that Mr. Tribe, who argued on behalf of Al Gore in the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, has emerged as the leading legal opponent of Mr. Obama’s ambitious efforts to fight global warming...“The administration’s climate rule is far from perfect, but sweeping assertions of unconstitutionality are baseless,” Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School, and Richard Lazarus, an expert in environmental law who has argued over a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, wrote in a rebuttal to Mr. Tribe’s brief on the Harvard Law School website.

In a speech on climate change delivered during her visit to China last month, Harvard President Drew Faust described the problem as “a struggle, not with nature, but with ourselves.” During Climate Week April 6-10, Harvard will take a long look at the ongoing struggle to find man-made solutions to this man-made problem...At Harvard Law School, faculty members are debating President Barack Obama’s proposed power plant rules, which aim to reduce greatly the carbon dioxide emissions from existing facilities. Two of the nation’s top environmental lawyers, Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law and director of the School’s Environmental Law Program, and Richard Lazarus, the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, have posted online rebuttals to constitutional scholar and Carl M. Loeb University Professor Laurence Tribe’s contention that the proposed rules are unconstitutional.

Liberal Harvard professor Laurence Tribe doesn’t think of himself as aligned with Senate leader Mitch McConnell, but the two men agree that the regulations proposed by the EPA to control greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired plants is an abuse of executive power. Both are tossing hand grenades into President Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change, and although they’ve never talked and don’t know each other, they are a formidable team. Tribe mentored the young Obama and taught him constitutional law at Harvard, so it was a shock to hear him testify last month at a hearing of the House Energy and Power committee that Obama’s plan to gradually reduce pollution from coal-burning plants was the equivalent of “burning the Constitution.” In the same hearing, Tribe tried to distance himself from McConnell, calling the GOP leader’s “just say no” strategy on climate change “reckless” and “irresponsible.” In a lengthy email, Tribe says he had misgivings about the EPA regs when he first became aware of them late last year.

A letter by Laurence Tribe. To read Richard L. Revesz’s Op-Ed article attacking as “far-fetched” the arguments I made against the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate plan in a recent congressional hearing (“An Obama Friend Turns Foe on Coal,” March 26), one would never know that Mr. Revesz also testified at that hearing, making the identical attacks, which I refuted in detail. I strongly disagree with the way he portrays my arguments...To say my arguments would imperil the Clean Air Act’s centerpiece is absurd. The E.P.A. is defying the rule of law, and allowing its gambit here would allow agencies to rewrite the United States Code at their pleasure.

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz loved to argue as a Harvard student and boasted he'd get the best grades in his class, only to lose out to two other classmates. In a series of exclusive interviews with Metro, several of his former classmates painted a complex portrait of the Tea Party's most beloved presidential candidate. Laurence Tribe, a longtime Harvard law professor, said Cruz took his constitutional law class, challenged his teacher in interesting and "invariably right-leaning" ways at every turn...Renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz recalled Cruz was "not a very smiley guy," and he thought would become an "extraordinarily able appellate lawyer."...Another longtime Harvard law professor Charles Fried said he worked with Cruz when the latter was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. "I have a vivid recollection of a very smart, very disciplined man," he said. "I've been reading all these sharp elbow stories but I didn't see that. He was, I would say, correct. Respectful and correct."

Climate-change activists and advocates seldom have trouble finding villains. But recently, they've found a new one in a strange place: famed legal scholar and Obama mentor Laurence Tribe, in his office at Harvard Law School. Tribe has been the highest-profile legal scholar to criticize the Obama administration's rules for carbon-dioxide emissions from coal plants, which were formally proposed in June 2014. (He's one of the few law professors who is frequently and plausibly referred to as an "icon.") In a formal comment submitted to the EPA, a Wall Street Journal column, a House energy committee hearing last week, and other venues, Tribe has argued against the rule, suggesting both that it runs contrary to the relevant statute and that it violates the Fifth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. ... And Tribe's opponents also bring significant legal firepower to the discussion. One opponent is Richard Revesz, dean emeritus of New York University Law School, who testified in favor of the rule in last week's House hearing and wrote a New York Times op-ed Thursday disagreeing with Tribe. Two others are Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman, colleagues of Tribe's at Harvard Law.

Laurence H. Tribe, the liberal icon and legal scholar, has grabbed headlines in recent weeks for publicly attacking President Obama’s signature climate change initiative — the Clean Power Plan — which would regulate carbon emissions from power plants. He was retained as an independent expert by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, and is representing it in a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the plan...In the estimation of his Harvard Law School colleagues Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus, “Were Professor Tribe’s name not attached to” these arguments, “no one would take them seriously.” But even if his claims don’t help Peabody in federal court, they are undoubtedly useful in the court of public opinion, where sentiment can be swayed by legal arguments, however weak, from a scholar of Professor Tribe’s reputation.

At Harvard Law School, contentious legal debates are commonplace. Whether in a classroom, over lunch, or in the pages of one of the school’s many legal journals, professors and students respond to, critique, and question one another’s views. But notably, over the past week, University professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 and Law School professors Richard J. Lazarus and Jody Freeman, in what Tribe described as an “uncommon event in Harvard Law School’s history,” took the discussion to the Harvard Law Today website. The exchange began after Tribe testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Power on the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Clean Power Plan.”

Liberals used to love the First Amendment. But that was in an era when courts used it mostly to protect powerless people like civil rights activists and war protesters. These days, a provocative new study says, there has been a “corporate takeover of the First Amendment.” The assertion is backed by data, and it comes from an unlikely source: John C. Coates IV, who teaches business law at Harvard and used to be a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the prominent corporate law firm. “Corporations have begun to displace individuals as the direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment,” Professor Coates wrote. The trend, he added, is “recent but accelerating.” Professor Coates’s study was only partly concerned with the Supreme Court’s recent decisions amplifying the role of money in politics. “It’s not just Citizens United,” he said in an interview, referring to the 2010 decision that allowed unlimited independent spending by corporations in elections. His study, he said, analyzed First Amendment challenges from businesses to an array of economic regulations...In a recent essay, Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, offered a cautious partial defense of the Citizens United decision. But he said it was an instance of a larger phenomenon. “It is part of a trend in First Amendment law that is transforming that body of doctrine into a charter of largely untrammeled libertarianism,” he wrote, “in which the regulation of virtually all forms of speech and all kinds of speakers is treated with the same heavy dose of judicial skepticism, with exceptions perversely calculated to expose particularly vulnerable and valuable sorts of expression to unconvincingly justified suppression.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is attaching himself to an unlikely bedfellow in his growing efforts to take down President Barack Obama’s climate plan. Liberal legal lion Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who taught constitutional law to President Barack Obama, is the new GOP darling in the fight against the Environmental Protection Agency’s upcoming climate regulations for power plants. Tribe handed Republicans a ready-made talking point during a House hearing this week, when he accused his former student of “burning the Constitution” in the effort to combat global warming. And two days later, McConnell pointed to Tribe in a letter Thursday to the governors of all 50 states, urging them to refuse to comply with EPA’s climate rules.

Earlier this week, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe testified before Congress on the legality of the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act. Tribe’s testimony garnered attention because he challenged the lawfulness of EPA plans and raised several constitutional concerns...Tribe’s criticisms of the EPA attracted attention not just because he is a prominent liberal law professor, but also because he briefly worked in the Obama Administration (though not on environmental matters) and was one of the president’s professors (and has sometimes been described as a “mentor”). Tribe’s testimony, and his suggestion that the EPA’s climate plans involved “burning the Constitution,” also prompted some pushback. Most notably, two of his colleagues at Harvard Law School — Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman — penned a response on the HLS Web site, challenging Tribe’s legal and constitutional analysis, with an emphasis on the latter. Tribe, in turn, wrote a lengthy rejoinder, also on the HLS Web site. This back and forth is a preview of the legal battle that awaits the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.