Laurence Tribe Quotes (1941-)

““One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.””

“This is going to be an important time for him, but I thought about him as a very important player at MSNBC for a long time. He knows more about the Senate than almost anyone else on television.”

“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.”

“The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to limit carbon pollution from the electricity sector is the centerpiece of the President’s plan to address climate change, and the foundation for U.S. leadership on an international climate agreement. In an effort to kill the rule, the coal industry has shrewdly hired Larry Tribe, our Harvard Law School faculty colleague and perhaps the nation’s most famous constitutional law professor, who is arguing on their behalf that the rule is unconstitutional. Like most proposed rules, the Administration’s climate rule is far from perfect, but sweeping assertions of unconstitutionality are baseless. Were Professor Tribe’s name not attached to them, no one would take them seriously.”

“To many Democrats and professors at Harvard, Mr. Tribe is a traitor. "The administration’s climate rule is far from perfect, but sweeping assertions of unconstitutionality are baseless," Jody Freeman... and Richard Lazarus, an expert in environmental law who has argued over a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, wrote in a rebuttal to Mr. Tribe’s brief on the Harvard Law School website.”

“Tribe has a history of plowing into high-profile environmental cases, typically on behalf of major industry clients like General Electric Co. He has fought other Clean Air Act regulations, and for about a decade tried to undermine a key provision of the Superfund cleanup law as unconstitutional. In nearly all of those instances, Tribe has been unsuccessful in court.”

“He helped General Electric argue that being ordered to clean up hazardous waste sites on the Hudson River was a violation of its constitutional rights. He aided Pacific Gas and Electric in complex bankruptcy proceedings, and defended Nike in a suit that claimed the company was lying about its sweatshop practices. Tribe also helped American Trucking Associations and the Petroleum Marketers Association of America fight common-law claims related to global warming. More recently, he assisted a hedge fund named Bulldog Investors in trying to block the enforcement of certain securities laws; his argument was based, in part, on the idea that such laws violated the fund’s First Amendment rights. In the nineteen-nineties, he worked on multiple cases helping the Bell companies companies try to avoid or nullify telecommunications regulation, and in the 2009 he helped Time Warner Cable fight net-neutrality rules, based on a theory of corporate First Amendment rights. In short, Tribe's representation of Peabody Energy is nothing new. It is rather representative of his work over the past two decades.”

“for work to be considered in the public interest, it ought to be, at least in part, on behalf of clients who are in some way underrepresented, or present views that would not be heard. This is true of some of Tribe's work; but in much of it he is empowering the powerful.”