Laurence Tribe Quotes

[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.

[T]he framers had derived the conviction that human rights could best be preserved by inaction and indirection—shielded behind... deliberately fragmented centers of countervailing power, in a vision almost Newtonian...

This book challenges the inevitability of permanent conflict... and tries to lay the groundwork for moving on.

[A] Bill of Rights directed against federal abuses was thought necessary in addition to the separation and division of powers...

[T]here are plenty of things besides private action that the Constitution is "not about."

[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.

[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.

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.

If you were to appoint someone like Sonia Sotomayor, whose personal history and demographic appeal you don't need me to underscore, I am concerned that the impact within the Court would be negative in these respects. Bluntly put, she's not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is, and her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the fire power of the Roberts/Alito/Scalio/Thomas wing of the Court.

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.

[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.

The political stage is... dominated by... well-rehearsed and deeply felt arguments, on either side... The debate is unending. ...[S]ingle-issue campaigning has ...distorted ...national elections. The losers will be the democratic process and the American people.

[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.

I mean to set aside... the complex superstructure of rules, doctrines, standards, legal tests, judicial precedents, legislative and executive practices, and the cultural and social traditions that together constitute what people call "constitutional law."

If forcing a woman to continue a pregnancy that will almost certainly kill her is impermissible, how different... to compel... a pregnancy that will probably shorten her life? Or... that will leave her life in shambles?