Laurence H. Tribe

Waging War, Deciding Guilt: Trying the Military Tribunals

A time of terror may not be the ideal moment to trifle with the most time-tested postulates of government under law. It is certainly not a good time to dispense lightly with bedrock principles of our constitutional system. Central among those principles is that great power must be held in check and that the body that defines what conduct to outlaw, the body that prosecutes violators, and the body that adjudicates guilt and dispenses punishment should be three distinct entities. To fuse those three functions under one mans ultimate rule, and to administer the resulting simulacrum

America's Constitutional Narrative

America has always been a wonderfully diverse place, a country where billions of stories spanning centuries and continents converge under the rubric of a Constitution that unites them in an ongoing narrative of national self-creation. Rather than rehearse familiar debates over what our Constitution means, this essay explores what the Constitution does. It treats the Constitution as a verb – a creative and contested practice that yields a trans-generational conversation about the meaning of our past, the imperatives of our present, and the values and aspirations that should point us toward our future. And it meditates on how this practice, drawing deeply on the capacious wellsprings of text and history, simultaneously reinforces the political order and provides a language for challenging its legitimacy, thereby constituting us as “We, the People,” joined in a single project framed centuries ago that nevertheless remains inevitably our own.

On Reading the Constitution.

Introduction 1. How Not to Read the Constitution 2. Structuring Constitutional Conversations 3. Judicial Value Choice in the Definition of Rights 4. Seeking Guidance from other Disciplines: Law, Literature, and Mathematics 5. Reconstructing the Constitution as a Readers Guide Notes Index of Cases General Index

American Constitutional Law

This textbook focuses on the Constitutions provisions for government structure and on how constitutional structure helps guarantee protection of substantive rights and liberties. It promises to be an indispensable resource for teachers, students, practicing lawyers and judges. This preeminent treatise provides a wealth of original, insightful, and influential analysis of constitutional law doctrine and policy.Professor Tribes central concern is the Constitution itself, not the Supreme Court as an institution. While addressing relevant issues of institutional capacities and roles, he does not stop at discussing the Court as the right or wrong forum to review a particular issue and render judgment; the more crucial question is whether the judgment itself was right or wrong as an element in the living development of constitutional justice.