Laurence Tribe

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.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has begun an aggressive campaign to block President Obama’s climate change agenda in statehouses and courtrooms across the country, arenas far beyond Mr. McConnell’s official reach and authority. The campaign of Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is aimed at stopping a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring states to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions...To make his case, Mr. McConnell is also relying on a network of powerful allies with national influence and roots in Kentucky or the coal industry. Within that network is Laurence H. Tribe, a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a former mentor of Mr. Obama’s. Mr. Tribe caught Mr. McConnell’s attention last winter when he was retained to write a legal brief for Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer, in a lawsuit against the climate rules. n the brief, Mr. Tribe argued that Mr. Obama’s use of the existing Clean Air Act to put forth the climate change regulations was unconstitutional.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) intent to use the Clean Power Plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions is unconstitutional, says Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. Tribe recently filed comments with the EPA saying that the Clean Power Plan is “a remarkable example of executive overreach and an administrative agency’s assertion of power beyond its statutory authority.”

As President Obama forges ahead in his fight against climate change, a leading Harvard Law School scholar says a central piece of the president’s strategy is akin to “burning the Constitution” merely to advance an environmental agenda. In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday, Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe said the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants is built on a shaky legal foundation. The proposal, Mr. Tribe argues, far exceeds EPA’s authority under federal law and strikes a blow to the 10th Amendment by essentially making states subservient to Washington on energy and environmental matters.

The law professor, who taught President Obama says the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the statutory and constitutional authority to force states to implement plans to cut carbon emissions at existing power plants. “In my considered view, EPA is off on a constitutionally reckless mission,” Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, said in prepared remarks at a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power hearing on Tuesday...“This submissive role for the states confounds the political accountability that the Tenth Amendment is meant to protect,” Tribe said in his remarks. “EPA’s plan will force states to adopt policies that will raise energy costs and prove deeply unpopular, while cloaking those policies in the Emperor’s garb of state “choice” – even though in fact the polices are compelled by EPA.”

On Tuesday, March 17, two professors from Harvard Law School, Laurence Tribe ’66 and Stephen Shay, will testify before Senate committees. Last week, Harvard Law School Professor Mihir Desai and Visiting Clinical Professor T. Keith Fogg testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance.

House Republicans will hold a slate of hearings challenging some of the Obama administration's main environmental rules. The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on energy and power is planning a Tuesday hearing to attack the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed carbon rules for power plants...The star witness for Republicans will be Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University Law School professor who once taught President Obama and later served as his adviser. In comments commissioned by coal giant Peabody Energy Corp., Tribe last year challenged the EPA’s legal grounding for the rule. Other legal experts and representatives from states will also testify.

Last month, a North Carolina sheriff announced that people on the state’s sex-offender registry could not attend church services in the community. Instead, Sheriff Danny Millsaps said, they could go to church at the county jail....Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, says such laws are sound as long as there is a consistent approach between secular and religious contexts. “If the county’s policy is to permit registered sex offenders to attend school events like ball games as long as school administrators have warning and the offenders are monitored,” he says, “then a similar exception needs to be made for church attendance as long as pastors are aware and agree to monitor the offenders.”

In the third season of "House of Cards," President Frank Underwood attempts a clever scheme to fund his $500 billion America Works jobs program...Simultaneously, he tries to convince Congress to cut Social Security drastically. The fictional president aims to reallocate all that money to fund the biggest jobs program since Roosevelt's New Deal. Leaving aside whether this is a good idea, we wanted to know if it would be possible. The answer we got from a number of legal experts was surprising...Gutting Social Security and using the money for a jobs program would require Congressional support, and the show gets that much right. It would be difficult to get that support — but it would be possible. Laurence H. Tribe, a Constitutional law professor at Harvard and a devoted fan of the show, explains how hard this would be: If money for a program like Social Security has been appropriated by a Congressional enactment, there is only one Constitutional way for the Treasury Department, under the direction of the President, to spend it on some different program, like the hypothetical “America Works” of the imaginary Underwood administration in House of Cards.

Last week’s oral arguments in King v. Burwell suggest that the United States Supreme Court will uphold the Affordable Care Act, according to several Harvard Law School professors...“I would say for people who hoped that the Court would permit the subsidies to be paid, it was a very encouraging oral argument,” said Richard H. Fallon, a law school professor...In particular, professors said Kennedy’s line of questioning suggests that he could vote to uphold the ACA. Einer R. Elhauge, a professor at the Law School, said it seemed “very likely” that Kennedy would vote to uphold the law as it exists now, providing the required fifth vote...Noah R. Feldman ’92, another professor at the Law School, also identified Kennedy as a potential vote in favor of the Obama Administration. “The clear news was that Justice Kennedy is thinking seriously about a problem with the challengers’ interpretation,” he said...For his part, University Professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 predicted a 6-3 decision in favor of upholding the ACA.