Laurence Tribe

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.

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.”