Free Republic

House Republicans have floated launching an impeachment inquiry against President Biden amid newly surfaced allegations that suggest his involvement in the business dealings his son, Hunter. But can congressional lawmakers initiate the use of that constitutional tool for alleged treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors that transpired before holding the office of the presidency? "The answer is clear," Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Fox News Digital. "No one knows." ....But Ray and Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard University, interpret that the alleged abuse should take place while the president is in office. "It...

Harvard Law School’s bonafide leftist Laurence Tribe didn’t see the ethics issue in advising President Joe Biden to ignore standing law on the debt ceiling in order to … uphold the law. Tribe penned an idiotic May 7 op-ed pontificating that it is supposedly the “essence of constitutional leadership, not the action of a tyrant” for Biden to ignore the law on the debt ceiling created by Congress. How is using carte blanche authority to cherry-pick which laws to uphold and which to ignore not the actions of a “tyrant?" Tribe piggy-backed off a nutty reading of the 14th Amendment...

DETROIT - President Joe Biden plans to take executive action Tuesday to ensure minorities, low-income Americans and others have better access to quality legal representation after services dwindled during the Trump administration. Biden will sign a memorandum directing the Department of Justice to restore key functions of the shuttered Access to Justice Office and to reestablish the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable. The plans are laid out in a presidential memo first shared with The Associated Press. The pandemic “has further exposed and exacerbated inequities in our justice system” as legal services were curtailed, Biden wrote. He added that...

One Of Obama's Harvard Professors Likened The President's Climate Change Policies To 'Burning The Constitution' A Harvard professor who taught U.S. President Barack Obama torched his prized pupil last month on Capitol Hill. Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe, who also served in the Justice Department under Obama, testified last month during a House hearing that the president's climate change policies are similar to "burning the Constitution." The 73-year-old Tribe argued that the Environmental Protection Agency is grossly overstepping its boundaries in respect to enforcing the president's doctrine. One conservative operative called the remarks "dazzling." "EPA is attempting an unconstitutional trifecta: usurping...

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is likely to seek a nominee for the Supreme Court who will not only defend the liberal jurisprudence that reshaped American society in the mid-20th century, but who may also aim to build a progressive legal vision for the century ahead. Mr. Obama's ideal candidate, speculates Harvard University professor Laurence Tribe, would "bring majorities together [on the court] around a compelling vision of the law with the elfin touch of someone like [William] Brennan, someone who can move the ocean liner without making terrible waves." Mr. Tribe taught constitutional law to Mr. Obama and today...

When Barack Obama’s two faculty mentors at Harvard Law got in trouble for plagiarism, they were rescued by Dean Elena Kagan. In 1989, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe hired first-year Harvard law student Barack Obama as his research assistant.  After Obama was elected president, Tribe would gush, "His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter." Obama had one other prominent mentor among the Harvard faculty, Professor Charles Ogletree, an African American.  In the run-up to the election, Ogletree would enthuse, "I'm so excited about this candidacy...

One of the most pitiful, relentlessly irritating op-eds about O-Care that I’ve read since our long national nightmare began in summer ’09. To understand what makes it so grating, you need to know that the author, Laurence Tribe, is not only a Harvard Law prof who taught Obama but a bona fide titan of constitutional jurisprudence on the left. He wrote a famous treatise on the subject and was, in his younger days, a perennial candidate for the Supreme Court when Democrats were in the White House. You might also remember him as the guy who sneered, amusingly, in a...

Ann Althouse brings up some great points in this trio of posts responding to another law professor's op-ed today, but none more better than this: Tribe's op-ed, as I wrote in the first post, rests very heavily on misrepresenting the Supreme Court's commerce power doctrine as referring to "commercial choices." In fact, the cases refer to "commercial activities," and a switch from "activity" to "choice" is immensely important in the health care litigation, in which opponents stress that the failure to buy insurance is inactivity, not activity, and therefore beyond even the broadest interpretations the Supreme Court has ever...

Ann Althouse took down Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe’s pro-ObamaCare NYT op-ed in a trio of blog posts Tuesday. Althouse, herself a law professor, called out Tribe for trying to equate activity with choice, when there is a big difference. In fact, the cases refer to “commercial activities,” and a switch from “activity” to “choice” is immensely important in the health care litigation, in which opponents stress that the failure to buy insurance is inactivity, not activity, and therefore beyond even the broadest interpretations the Supreme Court has ever given to the Commerce Clause.

Judge Roger Vinson's order last week declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional has prompted a pair of op-eds by professors at elite law schools: Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, in the Los Angeles Times, and Laurence Tribe of Harvard, in the New York Times. Both profs claim ObamaCare is constitutional. We were going to write "argue" rather than "claim," but we think that may be too generous. Neither article is a serious piece of legal analysis, because both professors simply refuse to take seriously the legal arguments on the other side, even after those arguments have been accepted by two federal trial judges....

WASHINGTON - Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe's name was yanked from an amicus curiae brief in a major U.S. Supreme Court climate change case earlier this month after the Justice Department told him his recent service in the department made it improper for him to be on the brief. The department invoked 18 U.S.C. 207(c)(1), prohibiting former senior employees from communicating with their former departments when those communications are "knowingly made with the intent to influence the department in connection with any matter on which such person seeks official action by any officer or employee of such department." Mr....

resident Obama has found himself at odds with his old law school mentor over the Environmental Protection Agency. Laurence Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard University, told House lawmakers that EPA carbon dioxide regulations are tearing the Constitution apart. “EPA possesses only the authority granted to it by Congress,” Tribe told lawmakers in a hearing Tuesday. “Its gambit here raises serious questions under the separation of powers… because EPA is attempting to exercise lawmaking power that belongs to Congress and judicial power that belongs to the federal courts.” “Burning the Constitution should not become part of our national energy...

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. 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...

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. Tribe said Cruz bragged to many of his classmates that he would receive the highest grade in the class, which...

I’ve obtained a copy of an interesting letter that Harvard law professor Larry Tribe wrote to his protégé, President Barack Obama, in the immediate aftermath of Justice Souter’s announcement of his decision to retire from the Court. I will post a PDF of the letter shortly. [Update: Here’s the letter.] In the meantime, I’ll call attention, in this post and two or three others, to some of its highlights. The express purpose of Tribe’s letter is to urge that Obama nominate Elena Kagan to the Souter vacancy. But before making his affirmative case for Kagan, Tribe argues strongly against the...

One wonders how Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center managed to get a hold of a private letter sent to President Obama by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe advising him against nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, but be that as it may, its contents are quite interesting and show just how nakedly political Tribe’s view of a justice really is and also how little he thinks of Sotomayor. In the May 2009 letter (PDF link here), Tribe advises Obama to refrain from choosing Sotomayor because “she’s not nearly as smart as she seems to think...

...Pundits weighing in on the scope of interrogation Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s Supreme Court Justice nominee will endure by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee predict she will be asked questions intended to inform as to how a J. Kagan would tend to rule in cases involving issues like guns (how seriously does she take the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms); and judicial restraint (can she separate her progressive politics from her rulings from the bench). Questions will also likely arise concerning her decision as Dean of the Harvard Law School to restrict military recruiting on campus (ban altogether...

Note: The following text is a quote: Attorney General Eric Holder Speaks at the U.S. Constitution Project Awards Dinner Washington, D.C. ~ Thursday, April 15, 2010 Thank you, Ginny [Sloan]. It’s good to be with you, and it’s a privilege to join you in celebrating the extraordinary contributions and achievements of tonight’s honorees, George Kendall and Ambassador [Thomas] Pickering. Congratulations to you both. I’m especially grateful for this opportunity to tell the Constitution Project’s leadership and membership how much I appreciate your commitment to the cause of justice, to the promise of equal justice, and to our nation’s most essential...

Here's my next installment looking at Larry Tribe's credibility problem, to put in perspective the credibility problem Ted Kennedy claims Judge Alito has (first 3 installments here, here, and here). You'll notice in the biographical information included on Tribe in the 2004 conference I mentioned in my last post, where Tribe claimed the New Republic had recently described him as the "premiere Supreme Court litigator of the decade" (not true; nothing like that appears in the New Republic, based on a full-text search going back to 1990), Tribe made a couple of statements about his win-loss record which don't seem...

As my next installment in looking at Larry Tribe's credibility problem to put in perspective the credibility problem Ted Kennedy claims Judge Alito has (for my first post see here), I have this question: In the aftermath of the Democrats "uninviting" one planned witness, Stephen Dujack, because of an essay which defended his grandfather's analogy between the Holocaust and the slaughter of animals for meat, an essay for which Dujack promptly apologized (here and here), why is Larry Tribe still listed as a witness for the Democrats tomorrow? Why hasn't he been "uninvited"? Tribe, after all, is infamous for his...