Laurence Tribe Quotes

Impeachment requires good judgment amid uncertainty, not a preprinted checklist of relevant considerations...

[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.

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.

The models... (I) separated and divided powers; (II) implied limitations of government; (III) settled expectations; (IV) governmental regularity (V) preferred rights; (VI) equal protection; and (VII) structural justice.

[T]he courts that held slaves to be non-persons, separate to be equal, and pregnancy to be non sex-related can hardly be deemed either final or infallible.

Americans have moved into ideological echo chambers... everything they read or hear reinforces their predispositions and makes them more intolerant of opposing views...

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.

[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.

[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.

[M]ost of us would readily concede that the framers of the 1787 Constitution adopted a federal system of government organization in order to, among other goals, help secure the institution of private property. When Madison, in his theory of faction, suggested that shifting the legislative responsibility for certain problems from the state to the national level could help assure that majorities would not trample on minority rights, the problems he had in mind were largely economic; the minority rights... were, for the most part, rights of property and contract.

Since it first came before the Supreme Court... abortion... has been about the Constitution. Whom does it protect? How do we decide..?

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.

Who knows the names of the countless women who have died from painful and illegal abortions? What of the names of the countless babies who would have been born...

Every sentence, every phrase, is in part silent with respect to how a reader or listener is to go about attributing meaning to it...

[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.