In the Review’s November 7 issue Laurence H. Tribe applies the lessons he’s learned in his decades as a constitutional scholar and advocate—he has argued before the Supreme Court three dozen times—to the stark choice presented by this year’s presidential election:
The threat to all our personal freedoms and civil liberties posed by a second Trump administration is not principally that Trump will finally have learned how to thoroughly weaponize his Department of Justice, filling it with obedient acolytes…. It is those freedoms, both negative and positive, that are secured to all of us by the Bill of Rights [and] the ordinary, day-to-day life we lead at our kitchen tables and in our bedrooms that [are] most dangerously threatened by the tyranny that a return of Trump to power would represent.
Tribe has been a contributor to The New York Review since 1998, when he wrote about the venerable legal scholar Charles Black’s final book, A New Birth of Freedom. Below, alongside his new essay, we have collected a selection of Tribe’s contributions to the magazine.
Laurence H. Tribe
Where Freedom Ends
Law can oppress as easily as it can liberate, and it is the everyday life we lead at our kitchen tables and in our bedrooms that is most dangerously threatened by a return of Trump to power.
Constrain the Court—Without Crippling It
Critics of the Supreme Court think it has lost its claim to legitimacy. But proposals for reforming it must strike a balance with preserving its power and independence, which remain essential to our constitutional system.
—August 17, 2023
Court v. Chatbot
(with Michael C. Dorf)
In a recent experiment, chatGPT showed a more developed moral sense than the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority.
—December 26, 2022
“Ever Freer to Speak My Mind”
“The right’s political program has the effect of making ours a less democratic, less inclusive, less gender-neutral, more homophobic, more misogynistic, more authoritarian, and more corporate-friendly and wealth-empowering polity.”
—September 24, 2022
Deconstructing Dobbs
Whether or not one sees the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as barely concealed theocracy, it fails to provide any coherent legal analysis of why the right to abortion is not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
—September 22, 2022
Politicians in Robes
Why does Stephen Breyer continue to insist that the Supreme Court is apolitical?
—March 10, 2022
The Scalia Myth
The selection of a justice to serve for life on the nation’s highest court is far too consequential to be treated either as an abstract referendum on legal methodology or as a game to be played for partisan advantage.
—February 27, 2016
Election 2024
The New York Review of Books is pleased to announce a series of virtual events on the most pressing aspects of the 2024 presidential election. In each conversation, held on Zoom, our contributors discuss the critical issues of our time.
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