Laurence Tribe

Turning the tables on a federal judge’s ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court has closed the doors to gay and lesbian couples in the state who want to be married...Until then, “the situation is pretty chaotic,” said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor. “We may have a kind of patchwork quilt in Alabama,” with other federal judges issuing their own marriage orders, he said. And if the state court tells judges to ignore those orders, he said, “we could have the kind of confrontation we had in Little Rock in 1957,” when Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus defied a federal court school desegregation order.

The curtain abruptly fell Wednesday on Alabama’s brief experiment in same-sex marriage. Across the state, all 48 county probate offices that had been issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples decided they could no longer do so, according to a survey by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group. ...Several legal analysts said that while Alabama justices might have had the legal authority to essentially contradict a lower federal court’s ruling, it was nonetheless stunningly provocative, given that many observers expect the United States Supreme Court to rule in favor of same-sex marriage for all 50 states when it takes up the matter this year. “This is thumbing the nose of the Alabama Supreme Court at the U.S. Supreme Court, but it’s not directly defying it,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “It’s coming as close to contemptuous defiance as it could possibly come without actually leaping directly into the pit.”

On the Supreme Court, it’s always May 17, 1954—at least for any justice contemplating his or her legacy. That was the day the liberal Warren Court handed down a 9-0 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that state-mandated segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The decision has come to be embraced as one of the most important and inspiring constitutional victories of our time...Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe—who was a lead counsel for the then-vice president in Bush v. Gore—says it’s often difficult for the public to separate the justices from the politics of the day, especially in cases that have significant political ramifications. “Ever since Bush v. Gore,” Tribe says, “the public has been inclined to assume that the justices are politicians in robes. Five-to-four decisions in most hotly contested cases look often enough as if they line up along political lines and justices, being aware of how the public sees them, can’t help recognizing this.”

An op-ed by Laurence H. Tribe. The Supreme Court is about to hear a case — King v. Burwell — that again threatens to undermine the Affordable Care Act and strip health insurance from millions of Americans. The King challenge, which focuses on a handful of words in that famously long piece of legislation, is a clever one. But it’s too clever by half. Finding for the challengers would require taking a few words in the ACA out of their proper context, ignoring the law’s structure and purpose, and even jettisoning the conservative justices’ own pro-states’ rights views.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts faced a conservative backlash after casting a decisive vote to save ObamaCare in 2012. Now he must weigh in on the law once again. The case of King v. Burwell, set for arguments before the Court on Wednesday, threatens to gut the law by invalidating subsidies to help millions of people buy insurance in the roughly three-dozen states relying on the federally run marketplace...“When interpreting statutory text, Roberts isn’t as fixated on isolated words and phrases as some Justices sometimes are,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who taught Roberts as a student, wrote in an email. “He pays close attention to the context in which phrases appear and to a statute’s overall purpose. That became especially clear when he joined Justice Ginsburg’s plurality opinion on Feb. 25 holding that fish didn’t count as ‘tangible objects.’”

If any Republican former state attorney general from the South announced his support for LGBT advocates’ side of a political issue, the move would make news. When Mike Bowers decided to do so, it was more than that. For 17 years, Bowers’ name was synonymous with the legal inferiority of gay people. Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 Supreme Court decision allowing state bans on “homosexual sodomy,” was only before the Supreme Court because Bowers, then the attorney general of Georgia, asked the justices to hear the case and uphold the constitutionality of the ban. Nearly 30 years later, Bowers says he’s “changed as society has changed.”...The man who represented Michael Hardwick before the Supreme Court, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, is taking in this week’s developments with a similar gracious-but-not-ignoring-the-past approach to Bowers. “I’ve been delighted to watch Mr. Bowers evolve,” Tribe told BuzzFeed News. “Better late than never!”

A conservative legal group filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the state’s century-old ban on corporate contributions to political candidates, and injecting new life into a long-running debate over the influence of special interests in Massachusetts politics...Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, said “the law is moving inexorably in the direction of invalidating almost all campaign finance limits.” Properly designed limits on direct corporate contributions to candidates may be one of the few restrictions that survive, he said. However, Tribe also suggested the Massachusetts law, as enforced, is not likely to meet court muster.

A federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt, at least temporarily, to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, siding with Texas and 25 other states that filed a lawsuit opposing the initiatives...Some legal scholars said any order by Judge Hanen to halt the president’s actions would be quickly suspended by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. “Federal supremacy with respect to immigration matters makes the states a kind of interloper in disputes between the president and Congress,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “They don’t have any right of their own.”

The diesel engine is a wonder of torque and thermal efficiency, but it emits soot and other unpleasantness. The Environmental Protection Agency is a wonder among regulatory agencies, having discovered authority to regulate diesel-engine pollution in other countries...Volvo will be supported by a National Association of Manufacturers friend-of-the-court brief written by none other than liberal superhero Laurence Tribe of Harvard.

In the long-running battle over a proposed 65-story office tower next to Grand Central Terminal, a little-known real estate investor has lobbied New York City officials, supported community opposition and offered to buy the project site from the developer. Nothing seemed to work. So as the planned office tower and a rezoning proposed by the de Blasio administration nears the end of the city’s lengthy review, the investor, Andrew S. Penson, brought in a weapon that he hoped would extinguish the project once and for all: Laurence H. Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar from Harvard...Mr. Tribe testified at a City Planning Commission hearing on Wednesday that the rezoning and the 1.6-million-square-foot tower — twice as big as the current zoning allows — “would amount to an unconstitutional taking” of the Grand Central owner’s property, saddling taxpayers with a potential $1 billion liability.

In the first test of its constitutionality, a state law that makes it illegal to lie in campaign ads is being challenged by a Republican political action committee whose treasurer is facing criminal charges over a negative mailing in the last election cycle....“It’s dramatically unconstitutional in its sweep,” said Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “This is an easy one.” The Supreme Court even struck down a federal law that made it illegal to lie about receiving a Medal of Honor, he noted, and held that lying can be criminalized in only limited instances, such as perjury. “It’s true that our politics from the very beginning has involved a lot of mudslinging,” he said. “But only in a tyrannical society can you shut that down this broadly.”

Even as Los Angeles became home to the country’s largest population of homeless military veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs for years has used much of its 387-acre tract near the city’s exclusive Brentwood neighborhood for other purposes, including leasing property to a car rental agency and the laundry facilities of a major hotel chain....This week, the department agreed to settle a three-year-old lawsuit on behalf of homeless veterans by pledging to build permanent and transitional “bridge” housing on the tract and at other locations throughout greater Los Angeles. ...The legal team also included the Inner City Law Center, Prof. Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, and two high-powered firms, Munger Tolles & Olson and Arnold & Porter.

The government has now filed its brief responding to the challengers in the King v. Burwell lawsuit, which claims the Affordable Care Act doesn’t make subsidies available to people in states on the federal exchange...Many observers expect Roberts to be the pivotal vote in this case. Harvard professor Laurence Tribe recently published Uncertain Justice, an excellent examination of the Roberts Court, in which he argues that Roberts saved the law the first time around — in NFIB v. Sebelius — by creatively resolving a dilemma he faced...I spoke to Tribe about the current dilemma Roberts faces as he prepares to hear King v. Burwell; an edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.

Following a Supreme Court decision last Friday to hear arguments on the issue of same-sex marriage, several Harvard Law School professors predict that the Court will grant a historic constitutional right to same-sex marriage nationwide, but they say a more moderate outcome remains a possibility...“I would guess that the best reading of the tea leaves is that there will be five votes upholding a right to gay marriage,” Richard H. Fallon, a Law School professor, said. He along with Charles Fried and Michael J. Klarman, also Law School professors, identified Justice Anthony Kennedy as the potential “swing vote.”...Law School professor and former Supreme Court clerk Laurence H. Tribe ’62 echoed the prediction in an email, writing that the he thinks the Court will “hold that the U.S. Constitution requires universal marriage equality.”...Mark V. Tushnet ’67, a Law School professor and former Supreme Court clerk, said that the addition of the second question allows the Court to “deal with the issue comprehensively, no matter the which way the first question came out.”

The first page of a petition seeking Supreme Court review is the most important. It sets out the “question presented,” the one the court will answer if it takes the case. The justices do not ordinarily tinker with the wording of those questions. But on Friday something unusual happened: In agreeing to hear four same-sex marriage cases, the court framed for itself the issues it would address...“The court’s order represents good housekeeping,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard. But Professor Tribe also voiced a small note of caution. “The rephrased questions,” he said, “technically leave open a middle path along which the court would prevent states from discriminating against same-sex couples lawfully married in their home states without requiring any state to take the affirmative step of issuing its own marriage licenses to same-sex couples.”

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe. As a law professor, I taught the nation’s first environmental law class 45 years ago. As a lawyer, I have supported countless environmental causes. And as a father and grandfather, I want to leave the Earth in better shape than when I arrived. Nonetheless, I recently filed comments with the Environmental Protection Agency urging the agency to withdraw its Clean Power Plan, a regulatory proposal to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s electric power plants. In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means.

Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe, a mentor to President Barack Obama, said the administration’s carbon rule for power plants is “a remarkable example of executive overreach” that raises “serious constitutional questions.” Tribe, who submitted joint comments to the Environmental Protection Agency with coal producer Peabody Energy Corp., said the agency should withdraw its plan to cut emissions from power plants because it reverses decades of federal support for coal. “The Proposed Rule lacks any legal basis and should be withdrawn,” Tribe and Peabody wrote in their filing, which law firms for the company said was submitted to EPA on the Dec. 1 deadline. Peabody, the nation’s largest coal producer, has declined more than 44 percent in trading since the EPA plan was unveiled at the beginning of June.

Once Barack Obama's mentor, Professor Tribe says the commander-in-chief could have done a little better on some things.(Also, he gave Obama an A+ in school--Ted Cruz got only an A.)

Impeachment has faded in Republican circles as an option to punish President Barack Obama over his sweeping executive actions to reshape immigration enforcement, ruled out even by hardliners like Rep. Steve King (R-IA) who are livid with the president and want to retaliate. An alternative that has gained some traction among Republicans is to "censure" the president...Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said a congressional resolution to censure a president is not clearly authorized by the Constitution, "so a strict constitutionalist would say that it's an action beyond the authority of Congress."

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a heart stent implanted on Wednesday, reviving talk about how long the 81-year-old liberal jurist will be staying on the court...Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, welcomed the news that Ginsburg plans to be back at the court next week, and he said she’d already hired one of his research assistants to clerk for her the year after next. “I expect her to still be there and thriving,” he added. He had harsh words for those liberals who were pushing for Ginsburg to retire, “With all respect to some of my liberal friends, I think they are being ridiculous,” he said. “She is not a quitter.”