Free Republic

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...

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...

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...

Sixteen appointees and advisers helping president-elect Barack Obama's Justice Department transition efforts all recently sat on the board of an organization little known outside legal circles: The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. The liberal legal network, which blossomed during eight years of Democratic exile, counts as its veterans Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder: Vice President-elect Joe Biden's chief of staff, Ron Klain; and future White House Staff Secretary Lisa Brown. Seven other recent board members are advising the incoming administration on legal, education, and labor-related issues. Theresa Wynn Roseborough is rumored to be a top candidate...

President-elect Barack Obama has urged the Senate to exclude from the seat he once occupied anyone appointed by embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. But if, as some have argued, the Senate is constitutionally bound to seat any qualified person the Illinois governor appoints, then one of the newly elected president's first quasi-official public pronouncements will prove to have subordinated constitutionalism to politics, not an auspicious start for an administration determined to replace the rule of expediency with the rule of law. Happily, the president-elect had his constitutional law right, and the critics who said the Senate would violate the Constitution...

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice. During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a "sad chapter in American history" and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed....

By James A. Barnes, National Journal © National Journal Group Inc. Monday, March 31, 2008 If potential presidents can be judged by how they run their campaigns, then how they staff those efforts may provide important clues to the kinds of talent they would recruit for their administrations. Because Democratic front-runner Barack Obama is a relative newcomer to national politics, an examination of his inner circle of political and policy advisers offers new windows into his thinking, leadership style, and sources of expertise. The Democratic front-runner's team has a relatively shallow bench, but its political achievements thus far are quite...

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe urged the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the District of Columbia's gun restrictions, the subject of a case the court will hear next Tuesday. Conceding that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess firearms, Tribe said that right does not rule out a decision to ban handguns while allowing "rifles, shotguns and other weapons less likely to augment urban violence." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit disagreed, concluding that the district cannot constitutionally ban the type of gun most commonly used for...

This time, the Supreme Court may have to decide what the Second Amendment means. But how much will really change? “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” U.S. Constitution, Amendment II Earlier this year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the District of Columbia’s stringent gun-control regulations, ruling squarely that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms. In the cultural and legal battle over gun control, the decision...

On Monday the New York Times uncharacteristically gave front page space to a story about liberal scholars who have -- albeit reluctantly -- come round to the individual rights view of the Second Amendment. Among the most prominent is Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (the man reported to have pushed senators to oppose the Robert Bork nomination) who now teaches that any law-abiding American adult who wants a Colt Diamondback to safeguard his family or go 'coon hunting has the Second Amendment behind him. Eight years ago scholars were predicting that Dr. Tribe's change of heart would "force judges and...

LARRY TRIBE GOES NUTS # 2 -- attacks Justice Scalia and FreeRepublic.com

Tribe goes nuts -- violates federal law by "outing" John Roberts as an A minus student!

IN October 1971, the White House tapped Assistant Attorney General William H. Rehnquist to respond to my critique of someone at the top of its short list for one of the two vacancies created by the nearly simultaneous resignations of two justices. I found his tepid apologia underwhelming. Yet within two months, when Mr. Rehnquist took the Supreme Court seat once marked for the target of my critique, I began to see how foolish it would have been to measure him by his defense of a candidate about whom he probably felt lukewarm. While it may be too soon to...

Laurence Tribe's Big Surprise Tony Mauro Legal Times 05-27-2005 Ordinarily, the announcement by a law professor that he is not completing the second volume of the third edition of his book would not even merit a yawn. But when that professor is Harvard Law School's liberal lion Laurence Tribe, the book is his famed treatise "American Constitutional Law" and he announces his decision in a letter to a Supreme Court justice, legal academics are left gasping in surprise and reaching deep for the appropriate metaphor. "It's like Michael Jordan leaving basketball at the top of his game," says Ross Davies...

BOSTON - Harvard University reproached law professor Laurence H. Tribe for failing to properly credit another author's work in a book published two decades ago. President Lawrence Summers and Law School Dean Elena Kagan said they concluded that Tribe's error was unintentional after they reviewed a report on an investigation by former Harvard President Derek Bok and two other scholars. The panel was appointed last fall after The Weekly Standard magazine pointed out similarities, including one exact 19-word passage, between his 1985 book "God Save This Honorable Court" and a 1974 book "Justices and Presidents" by Henry J. Abraham of...

Back in March 2004, former Pew Charitable Trusts program officer Sean Treglia attended a conference at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. Treglia must have felt gabby, because he launched into a long, discursive tale of how his former employers at Pew had used tens of millions of dollars to simulate a wave of popular support for campaign finance reform. "I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter," Treglia crowed. He probably assumed his anecdotes would stay between him and his sympathetic audience. But Treglia was being videotaped, and the videotape fell...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version February 25, 2005, 8:45 a.m. How To Be a Hero of LibertyYou may have to gild the lily . . . EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the March 14, 2005, issue of National Review. When historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was accused of plagiarism, Laurence Tribe rushed to her defense. The Harvard Crimson had published an editorial demanding that Goodwin resign from Harvard's board. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, wrote a letter to the Crimson criticizing its editorial as "utter...

Laurence H. Tribe, a leading Constitutional scholar and a high-profile lawyer, has become the second Harvard Law School professor this month to acknowledge that he lifted material from another scholar's works. After a magazine pointed out numerous instances in which his 1985 book "God Save this Honorable Court" echoes an earlier book by another professor, Tribe apologized for an "unacceptable" failure to properly credit the original writer. Tribe's book borrows liberally from "Justices and Presidents," a 1974 work by Henry J. Abraham, now an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia. One 19-word phrase is exactly the same in both...

Harvard constitutional law scholar Laurence H. Tribe ’62 apologized yesterday for not properly crediting another professor’s work in his popular 1985 book God Save This Honorable Court, one day after a conservative political magazine accused him of plagiarism. The Weekly Standard posted an article on its website Saturday charging Tribe with using language that closely mirrors sections of Henry J. Abraham’s 1974 book on Supreme Court appointments, Justices and Presidents. And at one point in his 1985 book, Tribe lifts a 19-word passage verbatim from Abraham’s text. Tribe could not be reached directly for comment yesterday, but issued a statement...

SUPPOSE you were doing a little research into the history of Supreme Court nominations, and you learned from one book that Grover Cleveland "bested Benjamin Harrison by almost 100,000 votes in the election of 1888, but the vagaries of the electoral college caused him to lose the election" (p. 130). And then, browsing through a later book on the topic, you read that Harrison is remembered for "losing the popular election in 1888 by 100,000 votes and still managing to take the Oval Office from incumbent President Grover Cleveland through the vagaries of the Electoral College" (p. 63). Perhaps you'd...

<p>It's wrong to hold an election if some voters will be disfranchised.</p> <p>There is palpable hypocrisy in the complaints one hears about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision in the California gubernatorial recall. People moaned and groaned about a hanging chad here and a dimpled chad there in Florida in the election of 2000 and succeeded in getting the federal judiciary to throw away thousands of ballots still uncounted as of an arbitrary date (Dec. 12, 2000). Their complaint was with the randomly distributed risk that similar-looking ballots would be read differently at different times or places given that Florida law refused to impose any uniform and objective formula for translating ambiguously punched ballots into definite votes.</p>

<p>Washington -- The Bush administration's top Supreme Court lawyer urged the high court Wednesday to toss out a San Francisco consumer activist's suit against Nike Inc. because it could discourage corporations from defending themselves in public against their critics.</p> <p>Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued Wednesday that the court must quash the lawsuit or citizens seeking to "advance their own agendas" would repeatedly haul corporations into court to challenge their views.</p>

Jerry was a man - are they? The headline arrested the eye: "Is a Chimp a 'Person' With a Legal Right to a Lawyer in Court?" And the mind went immediately to Robert Heinlein's 1947 short story, "Jerry Was a Man." But before getting into all that, some context. Periodically, stories pop up about the fate of smart animals, often those used in entertainment and research. Porpoises can be released back into the sea. But what about parrots past their prime or those whose owners have died or lost interest in them? And what about gorillas and chimpanzees? For years...