Laurence Tribe Quotes

[T]hese models are not... mutually exclusive... discourse in any given period can... draw on... more than one model. ...Their main function is . ...[T]he models ...grow out of immersion in judicial decisions and lawyers' arguments ...[T]hey should be ...familiar themes ...

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

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.

[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...

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...

The crux of any determination that a law unjustly discriminates against a group... is... that the law is part of a pattern that denies those subject to it a meaningful opportunity to realize their humanity. ...[S]uch an approach must look beyond process to identity and proclaim fundamental substantive rights—including substantive rights to participate on equal terms in the evolution of law and policy. ...[I]mportant aspects of constitutional law, including the determination of which groups deserve special protection, can be given content in no other way.

The state shapes the society as much as the society shapes the state...

For those whose minds are made up, this book offers a window into the way the "other side" sees... of why you have not been able to persuade opponents... insights into what they believe and... why.

[M]uch of what our Supreme Court does involves filling in the "great silences of the Constitution"...

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.

[I]t is largely because I find all exercises of power by some over others—even with what passes for the latter's consent—are and must remain deeply problematic, that I find all legitimating theories not simply amusing in their pretensions but... as dangerous as they are convincing.

[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.

[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.

[T]he Constitution is an historically discontinuous composition... the product... of a series of not altogether coherent compromises; it mirrors no single vision or philosophy but reflects instead a set of sometimes reinforcing and sometimes conflicting ideals and notions.

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.