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The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Gina McCarthy, speaks at the Center for American Progress' 2014 Making Progress Policy Conference in Washington November 19, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe has been getting a lot of press in advance of his representation of Peabody Energy in its dispute with the Obama Administration over the constitutionality of the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon dioxide emission regulations. The New York Times reported (April 6) that many of Tribe’s colleagues at Harvard Law School are “bewildered and angry.” Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School,...

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...

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.

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....

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...

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...

Why there’s really no chance President Obama will be able to appoint another Justice to the bench, regardless of what happens in November. It’s a question that’s roiled the liberal universe for years: Why won’t 81-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign from the Supreme Court and give President Obama the chance to pick her successor, in case the Senate turns Republican after the mid-terms? Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, one of the left’s jurisprudential heroes, had a ready answer to that question when it was posed to him at the University of California Santa Barbara late last month....

President Obama’s old Harvard Law professor, Laurence Tribe, said that he “wouldn’t bet the family farm” on Obamacare’s surviving the legal challenges to an IRS rule about who is eligible for subsidies that are currently working their way through the federal courts. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” Tribe told the Fiscal Times. “But I wouldn’t bet the family farm on this coming out in a way that preserves Obamacare.” The law’s latest legal problem is that, as written, people who enroll in Obamacare through the federal exchange aren’t eligible for subsidies. The text of the law only provides subsidies...

THERE’S PLENTY to be said as a policy matter both for and against the Affordable Care Act, but it’s beyond reasonable debate that it complies fully with the Constitution...[Snip]... The one provision whose constitutionality is questioned is the individual mandate...[Snip] That mandate, too, is constitutional. Congress found that the cost of providing uncompensated care to the uninsured totaled $43 billion in 2008, raising annual premiums for the average family by over $1,000. Suppose Congress had required anyone who received medical care at public expense in 2010 to purchase insurance for 2011 or face a modest increase ($750 per year) in...

After Bush v. Gore and Citizens United, many despaired that the Supreme Court would be able to salvage its reputation as a politically neutral arbiter. As the Senate was considering his nomination to become this nation's 17th chief justice, John Roberts—once a star pupil in my constitutional law class—famously compared the role of a judge with that of an umpire, just calling the balls and strikes. In many respects, that analogy is a deeply flawed one. Constitutional rules are not black and white; there are many shades of grey in between, and it’s up to our highest court both to...

Via the Examiner, I've been looking for tea leaves for you all day but this, unfortunately, is the best I can do. I don't even regard it as tea leaves: I think Tribe is just pre-spinning the outcome so that, if the mandate is struck down, he can call Roberts a disappointment who betrayed his education in a fit of ideological pique, etc etc etc. But we're starving for insight and this is, in its own lame way, an insight into Roberts' thinking. As is this: Eastman, a critic of the health care law, said he wouldnÂ’t be surprised to...

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...

Last week the unthinkable happened.  While you were distracted by the banal and only marginally important presidential primaries, the lion, Harvard Law School, publicly lay down with the lamb, the Tea Party Patriots.  The long-term political implications are, potentially, far more potent than a mere presidency. The SuperElite and the SuperPopulists convened at Harvard for a “Conference for a Constitutional Convention.”  It was co-hosted by Lawrence Lessig, from Harvard, and by Mark Meckler, co-founder of the 850,000 member Tea Party Patriots. Lessig is a leading figure on the social democratic left, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for...

People who say the Constitution is “living” or “invisible” usually don’t like what it says and don’t have the patience or the votes to amend it.

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....

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...

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...