Laurence Tribe Quotes

Since it was judges who had read abortion rights into the Constitution, abortion opponents believed, we needed judges who would read abortion back out... [S]ome urged a that would... have prohibited abortion or... at least have returned the question to each state's legislature, but... consensus and effort... proved elusive.

[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.

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.

[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.

[W]e may... find more common ground than we currently imagine.

[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.

[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.

Warring partisan tribes now define a dysfunctional system...

Given its remarkable activism in constraining the President vis-à-vis Congress and the courts and in limiting Congress vis-à-vis the States, the current Supreme Court cannot be understood as pursuing a modest institutional role. ...I prefer postulates honestly expressed to analyses whose underlying assumptions are obscured by the jargon of neutral principles and the language of "objective" legal description.

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.

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

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.

[W]hy do thoughtful judges and scholars continue to put forth the process-perfecting theories as though such theories could banish divisive controversies over substantive values from the realm of constitutional discourse by relegating those controversies to the unruly world of power?

[T]he highest mission of the Supreme Court... is not to conserve judicial credibility, but in the Constitution's own phrase, "to form a more perfect Union" between right and rights within the charter's necessarily evolutionary design.

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