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Laurence Tribe
93 quotes
“[M]y reference to an "invisible" Constitution should not be confused with the way some... are prepared to disregard all or part of the Constitution in times of crisis, real or manufactured. My interest... is in what... the Constitution's words cannot hope to reveal. I'll leave for another day the views of some that—because the Constitution is not... a "suicide pact"—we should sometimes act as though parts of what it says have conveniently become invisible.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Justice Stephens leaves, you might consider... about whom... I know less than I'd like... or someone like Kathleen Sullivan, who might well be worth fighting for in that crucial seat.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For all these reasons, I hope you will reach the conclusion that Elena Kagan should be your first nominee to the Court. ...I can hardly contain my enthusiasm at your first hundred days. I don't underestimate the magnitude of the challenges that remain, and I... hope that I can before too long come to play a more direct role in helping you meet those challenges, perhaps in a newly created DOJ position dealing with the rule of law, but my main sentiment... is one of enormous pride and pleasure in being an American at this extraordinary moment in our history.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here are plenty of things besides private action that the Constitution is "not about.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[M]any of the most important Supreme Court decisions take the form of holding that a particular limit either has not been exceeded or, more fundamentally, that the asserted limit is not in fact part of the Constitution at all.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[C]onstitutional silence"... pervades all of constitutional law.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[M]uch of what our Supreme Court does involves filling in the "great silences of the Constitution"...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he "dormant Commerce Clause" [is] a set of unwritten constitutional principles limiting state commercial regulation in the face of congressional silence coupled with the Constitution’s delegation to Congress of the power to regulate interstate commerce.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[C]onstitutional silences, like silences of other kinds, aren’t just occasional gaps or omissions in an otherwise-seamless design. They’re everywhere and come in as many flavors and varieties as sounds. Ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings are in a sense manifestations of silence.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are as many reasons to be silent as there are to speak, and as many ways to hear meaning in the sounds of silence.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every sentence, every phrase, is in part silent with respect to how a reader or listener is to go about attributing meaning to it...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e should beware of "hearing" silences where nearly all readers, setting aside how they would like a particular controversy to end, identify determinative text... "The heart has its reasons," as Pascal famously said, "that reason does not know." Good enough. And those heartfelt reasons deserve a hearing. But when they defy reason, the meaning of living by the rule of law is that reason should prevail.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]ttempting to organize and give structure to the study of legal silence has been a primary purpose of much of what I have written and taught over the past half-century.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Impeachment haunts Trumpland... Never before has an American leader so quickly faced such credible, widespread calls for his removal...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]mpeachment does not require proof of a crime... The argument that only criminal offenses are impeachable is deeply and profoundly wrong. It misunderstands the Constitution, U.S. history, and the nature of criminal law in important ways.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Impeachment requires good judgment amid uncertainty, not a preprinted checklist of relevant considerations...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e’re skeptical that so-called "impeachment precedent" commands deference apart from its power to persuade future generations. Congress isn’t bound by its own prior decisions.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" was a term of art dating to 1386, and had thus accumulated centuries of intellectual baggage, there's no reason to think the Framers had all that in mind.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[H]igh Crimes and Misdemeanors... involve corruption, betrayal, or an abuse of power that subverts core tenets of the U.S. governmental system. They require proof of intentional, evil deeds that risk grave injury to the nation. Finally, they are so plainly wrong by current standards that no reasonable official could honestly profess surprise at being impeached.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t would be strange to pretend we can discuss "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" today without any reference to Donald Trump...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Warring partisan tribes now define a dysfunctional system...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Americans have moved into ideological echo chambers... everything they read or hear reinforces their predispositions and makes them more intolerant of opposing views...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we eventually win in the Supreme Court, and Trump thumbs his nose at the court and defies it, ...and there is some reason to think he might just do that, because he seems to believe he's above the law, then the whole system will collapse unless he is impeached and removed. But I am... more confident... that even people on his side of the political aisle, who seem completely spineless when it comes to reigning him in now, might get religion at some point, and might conclude, enough is enough. We just can't hitch our wagon to this guy's falling star any longer.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There have been impeachment talk... about Truman, Jackson... even about Jefferson, but the really serious efforts in our history have been efforts after the Civil War, beginning with Andrew Johnson and then continuing with Nixon and Clinton and now perhaps... Trump.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We... devote... Chapter five to the proposition that there is too much loose impeachment talk, and we think that impeachment... needs to be cautiously and carefully approached.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Social media companies] are private platforms. They have... as much right as Bloomberg or as The New York Times... to decide whom they will allow to use their platform. There is no first amendment right to use private property or a private platform to get your views out, and if your views are causing violence and death, the private platform itself ought to be held responsible for not taking you off.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not comfortable with there being no restrictions. I'm a member with and and others of... the Real Facebook Oversight Board. I think the government should put some limits on them partly because they're so powerful. That does not mean that anybody who wants to has the right to use the platform. The limits are limits that have to be consistent with the first amendment restrictions on the government, but we can't simply transform these platforms into... places that anybody can use, when they are... privately owned, however powerful, however large.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A] governmental regime of guidelines which have to be followed, which do not involve private restraints because they would not enjoin any speech in advance. Those guidelines need to be in place so that we don't unfairly surprise the owners of Facebook, or other platforms, or Twitter, but... avoiding the ex-post facto effect of imposing rules after the fact is not the same as violating the doctrine, which basically says you can't muzzle people in advance.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now the country is faced with a president whose conduct strongly suggests that he poses a danger to our system of government. ...[I]mpeachable offenses could theoretically have been charged from the outset of this presidency. ...One important example is Trump’s brazen defiance of the ...The question of Russian interference in the presidential election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign go to the heart of our system and ability to conduct free and fair elections. ...[R]eporting suggests... the... sinister, with Trump insisting that Comey pledge "loyalty" to him in order to retain his job... the president turned to Twitter with a none-too-subtle threat that Comey would regret any decision to disseminate his... conversations... Nixon’s... list of actions... deemed... impeachable obstruction reads like a forecast of... Trump... misleading statements to, or withholding material evidence from, federal investigators or... employees; trying to interfere with FBI or congressional investigations; trying to break through the FBI’s shield surrounding ongoing criminal investigations... [T]he crucial thing is that the prospect now be taken seriously, that the machinery of removal be reactivated, and that the need to use it become the focus of political discourse...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Trump must be impeached. Here’s why." (May 13, 2017) The Washington Post Opinions
“[T]hat speech... was political genius but jurisprudential danger, because he created an impression that Robert Bork really liked the idea of coat-hanger abortions, that he liked the idea of racial separation of neighborhoods, whereas the fact is that Bork’s philosophy might have led to many of those consequences, but to demonize him the way my friend Ted Kennedy did I thought was going to work politically, but something that people would come to regret later. And, of course, I think that’s what happened, because it rallied a lot of academics and scholars and moderates to Bork’s side, thinking that he had been improperly caricatured...”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Frontline Interview: Laurence Tribe (January 29, 2019) interview by ,
“One cannot speak of "groups" as though society were objectively subdivided... Instead, people draw lines, attribute differences, as a way of ordering social justice—of deciding who may occupy what place, play what role, engage in what activity. Thus, in order to justify the role of chattel that blacks initially played in our society, we may have differentiated that role by describing it in terms of the most obvious distinguishing feature... equating race and role. This equation and thus "group" survived the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment... simply by reason of confusion or inertia, but because the role that society allowed remained partially unchanged; thus, the need to justify the role by differentiating it, by seeing not the role but the group—"inferior" blacks capable of nothing better...—persisted.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he question of whethor a particular amendment has... been lawfully ratified... would matter mightily with amendments as the three passed in the wake of the Civil War—the Thirteenth (abolishing slavery), the Fourteenth (defining citizenship and guaranteeing certain basic human rights to all persons in their dealings even with their own states), and the Fifteenth (abolishing racial qualifications for voting)—whose ratification by the legislatures of the former Confederate states was not exactly voluntary. Their acquiescence was secured by force, having been made a condition for their reentry into the Union from which they had attempted to secede.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[M]any constitutional scholars, political and moral philosophers, and social and political historians have described over the generations... the "unwritten Constitution," the subject of a classic study by William Bennett Munro published in 1930... "The Makers of the Unwritten Constitution,"... built on a still earlier and highly influential 1890 work by Professor Christopher G. Tiedeman... "The Unwritten Constitution of the United States." ...[S]cholarly work ...lay largely forgotten until ...resurrected in the writing of ...scholars in the 1970s. The focus... responses to the supposedly problematic legitimacy of having unelected and politically unaccountable judges resort to unenacted norms of this "unwritten Constitution" when holding duly promulgated laws and executive actions "unconstitutional.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it very important that you view the vacancy created by Justice Souter's resignation as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a series of appointments that will gradually move the Court in a pragmatically progressive direction. Neither Steve Breyer nor Ruth Ginsburg has much of a purchase on Tony Kennedy's mind. David Souter did, and it will take a similarly precise intellect, wielded by someone with a similarly deep appreciation of history and a similarly broad command of legal doctrine, to prevent Kennedy from drifting in a direction that is both formalistic and right-leaning on matters of equal protection and personal liberty.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the Souter seat, I can't think of anyone nearly as strong as Elena Kagan, whose combination of intellectual brilliance and political skill would make her a ten-strike... I've known and worked for her... since she was my student and research assistant in the 1980s, have watched her become a scholar of the first rank and a star... teacher, and have marveled at how skillfully she transformed a school that had long been considerably less than the sum of its parts into a vibrant and wonderful place for students to learn and for faculty to teach, write, and collaborate. Her techniques for mastering the substance of the many fields in which we have made important new faculty appointments during her tenure as dean and for gently but firmly persuading a bunch of prima donnas to see things her way in case after case—techniques she has deployed with a light touch and with an open enough mind to permit others to persuade her from time to time—are precisely the techniques I can readily envision her employing not just with Justices like Kennedy but even with a justice like Alito or, on... rare occasions, with a justice like Scalia or Roberts.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's easy to underestimate how much difference David Souter's analytical prowess and historical command have made within the Court over the past 19 years in shaping both the language of other justice's opinions and on occasion their votes in important lines of cases. Elena Kagan seems to be uniquely suited to perform that task, and to perform it for the next thirty years or longer. Dianne Wood—who is more powerful intellectually than Sonia Sotomayor or any of the others mentioned as plausible prospects... with the sole exception of Kagan, who is even smarter—would be likely to serve nearly a decade less than Elena and doesn't appear... to have the dynamic personality or the extraordinary diplomatic gifts for inspiring confidence and for moving others that have made Elena Kagan the best dean of any major law school in memory and certainly the best Harvard dean in the forty years I have spent on the faculty here.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t's easy to forget how much difference the public face of the Supreme Court can make in advancing a humane and yet suitably cautious conception of the rule of law and the role of courts in the pursuit of justice. That's a facet of the Court's role to which few justices over our history have made much of a contribution, given the significant limits on what a sitting justice can suitably say in a public forum. Louis Brandeis, Earl Warren, and Robert Jackson might be cited as exceptions. David Souter certainly couldn't be credited with success in that role, although the conspicuous modesty of his personal style was a plus... Elena Kagan would, however, combine that personal modesty with an appealing public persona and would project a well-grounded image of justice as fairness and of law as codified common sense. In that regard... a Justice Kagan would be a much more formidable match for Justice Scalia than Justice Breyer has been—and certainly than a Justice Sotomayor or a Justice Wood could be—in the kinds of public settings in which it has been all too easy for Scalia to make his rigid and unrealistic formalism seem synonymous with the rule of law and to make Breyer's pragmatism seem mushy and unconstrained by comparison. It is important... for the simultaneously progressive and yet principled, pragmatic and yet constrained, approach to law and justice that you have espoused... since becoming president, to be embodied in the person and voice of your first Supreme Court nominee. Elena Kagan would personify that approach and would ultimately be seen by the American public to exemplify it.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“American Constitutional Law... final chapter... "The Problem of State Action," grappled with one of the most perplexing aspects in the law of the U.S. Constitution: its character as a body of law addressing not ordinary private conduct but only government conduct. ...[T]he law of the Constitution is a kind of meta-law. ...many instances of what might be regarded as government inaction pose troubling constitutional questions. ...[T]he Supreme Court has generally interpreted constitutional provisions as having nothing at all to say about non-governmental choices. ...One might ...say that the constitutional principle limiting the Constitution’s reach to "state action" is an unwritten command ...essentially "heard" in the sounds of constitutional silence. ...I closed the book with the question: "[I]s it not fitting that a book about the Constitution should close by studying what the Constitution is not about?”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We would hope that this book would be a point of reference for people, as well as a enjoyable read, twenty... twenty-five years from now, we wrote it... for the ages. I've been teaching for almost fifty years, and I didn't want to write a book about just one president, especially a president who is so far off the charts as this one. We may have more like him, though, and we need to be able to reason together, as Lyndon Johnson... used to like to say... about what it should take to bring a president down. ...[T]here are other ways of trying to reign him in, and we have by no means exhausted them. I'm involved, as is my coauthor [Joshua Matz], with a number of lawsuits against this president for violating the anti-corruption or s of the constitution, and for violating the constitution in a lot of ways.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he framers were deliberately vague. They didn't want to limit it to treason and bribery because they knew that there were other things that could so violate the basic structure of our constitution, of checks and balances, that they couldn't even predict in advance. So they wanted a general term that would refer to profound abuses of power that threaten the rule of law. Those needn't be crimes. For example, if the president promises to pardon anybody who beats up one of his opponents, or beats up a non-white immigrant, and basically says, "All of you guys have a get out of jail free card." That would be a manifestly impeachable offense, but it wouldn't be a crime. At the same time there are some crimes that are not high crimes and misdemeanors in the sense that the framers used that language, like tax evasion. ...[I]f this president is evading his taxes, that's not an abuse of his official powers. But they resisted going even further and making it a complete free-for-all. That is, at one point they debated making maladministration... impeachable... Well, that could mean any disagreement with the president. There are some countries that say that misconduct is... impeachable... There are some states that, in application to their governor say that misbehavior is... impeachable... Well that would mean that any time the Congress disagrees profoundly with the president on policy... Suppose it passes a law, he vetoes it, they can't override the veto, but if they basically say... we were right and you were wrong, they could just impeach him. ...An effort of that kind was made with President John Tyler. They thought he vetoed too many bills, and that was the impeachable offense. So the framers of the constitution struck a balance and left the judgement to us. They didn't try to create a formula for what was an impeachable offense, but they didn't just say any time you disagree with president, the thing to do is impeach him and try to remove him. They struck a balance in between, and a pretty good one, although it's one that leaves a huge amount of judgement to... we the people.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he lesson from the Clinton impeachment is that purely partisan impeachments for offenses like lying under oath about a sexual affair, that don't really shake the Republic and threaten our ability to abide by the rule of law in general; that those kinds of impeachments are going to fail in the Senate and only embolden and empower the acquitted president. So Clinton's popularity just soared after the impeachment was rejected by the Senate. The Andrew Johnson impeachment is rather different. In that one, where he came within one vote of being convicted, most historians have concluded that the impeachment was terribly partisan, that it wasn't based on any real abuse. The basic charge on which he was impeached was his decision to fire the , , without the consent of the Senate, in violation of... the Tenure of Office Act. Now that was a technical basis that was cooked up, and it wasn't a very good one, because the... Act, not long afterward was struck down as unconstitutional. The president should not have to consult the Senate for firing a cabinet member. But there was a good reason that could have been used in his case. He was fundamentally trying to undo the Union victory in the Civil War. He was unwilling to pursue Lincoln's program of Reconstruction and he was going to be essentially open to all but re-enslaving African-Americans. His programs.. policies... practices showed that he was ripping the country apart, rather than helping to cement the Union that Lincoln had successfully preserved. That wasn't a crime, but it was what the constitution elegantly calls a high crime or misdemeanor and if he had been charged with that... a conviction in the Senate would have been more likely, and more appropriate. So the lesson... is that we should revisit our history, and not simply take the standard views of it as automatically right, and that we should be careful when we use the impeachment power to frame the right reasons for going after a president who has fundamentally broken his compact with the American people and his oath under the constitution.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Impeachment is a political process, but it has a legal frame of reference... [O]ne of the things we try [very hard] to do in our book... is explain how law and politics interact in this process, and... if you forget the political side, you're going to make a terrible set of blunders. But if you ignore the legal side, you're going to risk destroying the Constitution and the country. I agree, from a strictly partisan, political point of view... that letting Trump basically do himself in and make all kinds of terrible blunders, (and there seems to be a new one every day with this crazy pardon or a completely weird imposition of a tariff that will lose American jobs) that he will make things worse and worse... for himself. But the Constitution we have is a fragile device and if in the course of doing that, he defies judicial orders... He says he might defy an order to submit to a , which would be a first in American history... basically presidents are subject to subpoena, but if he is subpoenaed and as his lawyers said in a memo... he says "No, the president is above the law, above the subpoena power." Then, even though it might be politically wise to just do nothing, we would be breaking faith with the constitution to essentially go back to a system where someone is king. ...Tyrants don't easily give up power, and if we simply let this guy get away with anything, and say, "Let's wait til 2020." It may be too late by 2020 to restore a constitutional democracy under the rule of law.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A subpoena was issued to Richard Nixon to turn over his tapes. He made the argument that you can't subpoena a sitting president... He lost... in the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous... Nixon tapes case. In , Bill Clinton made the argument that you can't make me testify, and it looked like that was going to go nowhere, so he finally relented and testified "voluntarily." ...[T]he argument that is made in... a memo [to Robert Mueller]... It's basically written to a kind of gullible, nonlegal public. It doesn't make any genuine legal arguments. In fact, there's a rather frightening statement... that it doesn't matter how corrupt the president's motives are. He can do anything with the Department of Justice, as though it's his own private law firm. It says, "I can even use the pardon power." Well, of course he can use the pardon power as a way of showing mercy to people, but he's begun using it as what I have called a giant and loud elephant whistle, basically telling people, "If you have my back and don't cooperate with the investigations into what Russia did, and what I did, and what I knew and when I knew it, I'll have your back." ...[I]t almost sounds like he's saying that he can pardon himself, and thereby evade impeachment. Well, first of all, the impeachment clause itself says that the pardon power does not extend to cases of impeachment. But if all he means is that he can pardon himself so that when he is out of office he can't be convicted, I think he's confusing himself with vice president Pence. Pence can pardon him if he leaves office, the way Ford pardoned Nixon, but as I show in an article with and others, the self-pardon is ruled out by the structure of the Constitution. The President can say, "Pardon me" if he steps on your toes, but he can't say "Pardon me" as an exercise of official power. That would be the height of regal arrogance, and we don't have a king, we don't have an emperor. In fact, one of our complaints in the Declaration of Independence against King was that he was using his royal prerogative to obstruct justice. Well, if this president thinks that obstructing justice in order to corruptly avoid discovering the truth is within his absolute authority, I think he's got a lesson to learn, and I think the American people will teach it.”
Laurence Tribe (born 1941) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 17:56 Also see 1)The Trump Legal Team’s Jan. 29, 2018, Confidential Memo to Mueller in "The Trump Lawyers’ Confidential Memo to Mueller, Explained" (JUNE 2, 2018) The New York Times 2) , , Laurence H. Tribe, "The Emolum…