Laurence Tribe

Together with former conservative judge J. Michael Luttig, Tribe argued that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was self-executing and rendered Donald Trump ineligible for office following 6 January 2021. The Supreme Court subsequently unanimously overturned Colorado's decision excluding him from the presidential primary.

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In 2023, during the debt ceiling standoff, Tribe publicly reversed the position he had defended in 2011 and argued that Section 4 of the 14th Amendment could require the President to continue meeting federal obligations, even if this meant borrowing beyond the ceiling set by Congress. Joe Biden cited Tribe's change of position in his own deliberations.

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Kenneth Chesebro, a former assistant and collaborator of Tribe, relied on Tribe's earlier comments and writings in memoranda that contributed to the 2020 alternative electors plan. After the documents became public, Tribe stated that Chesebro had grossly misrepresented his analyses and taken them out of context to lend an appearance of legitimacy to the plan.

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In 2017, Tribe repeatedly shared content from Palmer Report and other unreliable anti-Trump sources. One particularly criticised example claimed, on the basis of an anonymous or very poorly sourced tweet, that Donald Trump had transferred ten million dollars of Russian money to Jason Chaffetz. Misinformation specialists criticised Tribe for using his standing to amplify unverified claims.

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Alongside his academic career, Tribe developed a substantial private constitutional law practice for wealthy companies and organisations. He notably helped General Electric challenge the Superfund regime and advised Nike, Pacific Gas & Electric, the American Petroleum Institute and other clients. Academics questioned whether this commercial practice risked influencing or blurring his identity as a scholar.

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Retained by Peabody Energy, Tribe argued that the EPA's proposed Clean Power Plan rested on fundamentally flawed constitutional and legal foundations. Law professors, including at Harvard, described some of his arguments as weak or far-fetched, while critics accused him of using his academic prestige to serve the coal industry.

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Passages in Laurence Tribe's book 'God Save This Honorable Court' reproduced wording from an earlier work by Henry Abraham without adequate quotation marks or citations. Following a review, Harvard concluded that the lack of attribution constituted a 'significant lapse in proper academic practice'.

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Directly implicated