Laurence Tribe on Justice

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

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

"So the written Constitution, the one we can see, fails to tell us just what's in it and what's not."

"Book Review To End a Presidency" by Michael Stokes Paulsen, Harvard Law Review."

"onstitutional silence"... pervades all of constitutional law."

"The models... separated and divided powers; implied limitations of government; settled expectations; governmental regularity preferred rights; equal protection; and structural justice."

"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..."

"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."

"I... organize the constitutional principles, rules, and theories... in terms of the seven basic models that... have represented the major alternatives for constitutional argument and decision in American law from the early 1800s to the present."

"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."

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

"No one... persuaded that the categories of constitutional discourse, or of law generally, are readily rendered determinate and certain—and no one who believes that those categories are inherently empty, infinitely malleable, and ultimately corrupt—need read any further."

"Since it was judges who had read abortion rights into the Constitution, abortion opponents believed, we needed judges who would read abortion back out... 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."

"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."

"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 , the Fourteenth , and the Fifteenth —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."

"That body of materials, unlike the Constitution itself, is massive and continuously growing... and changing... Many capable scholars have argued that this elaborate edifice is entitled to great respect as the "law" of our Constitution, "law" whose legitimacy ironically is in many ways easier to defend than is the legitimacy of the underlying text itself, and whose role in enabling the Constitution to carry out the important functions in our history is not difficult to demonstrate."

"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. ...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. ...mportant aspects of constitutional law, including the determination of which groups deserve special protection, can be given content in no other way."

"If we eventually win in the Supreme Court, and Trump thumbs his nose at the court and defies it, ...and there is some reason to think he might just do that, because he seems to believe he's above the law, then the whole system will collapse unless he is impeached and removed. But I am... more confident... that even people on his side of the political aisle, who seem completely spineless when it comes to reigning him in now, might get religion at some point, and might conclude, enough is enough. We just can't hitch our wagon to this guy's falling star any longer."

"ust as I am not writing for those who feel confident that canons of appropriate constitutional construction may be convincingly derived from some neutral source, so I am also not writing for those who have convinced themselves that "anything goes" as long as it helps end what they see as injustice; that constitutional law is only a legitimating mask for what those in power can get away with; or that it is only a tame language in which those that would otherwise foment violent revolution can couch their demands in forms the regime might accept without losing face."

"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. ...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 , with a number of lawsuits against this president for violating the anti-corruption ors of the constitution, and for violating the constitution in a lot of ways."

"One cannot speak of "groups" as though society were objectively subdivided... Instead, people draw lines, attribute differences, as a way of ordering social justice—of deciding who may occupy what place, play what role, engage in what activity. Thus, in order to justify the role of chattel that blacks initially played in our society, we may have differentiated that role by describing it in terms of the most obvious distinguishing feature... equating race and role. This equation and thus "group" survived the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment... simply by reason of confusion or inertia, but because the role that society allowed remained partially unchanged; thus, the need to justify the role by differentiating it, by seeing not the role but the group—"inferior" blacks capable of nothing better...—persisted."