"I do not have, nor do I believe I have seen, a vision capacious and convincing enough to propound as an organizing principle for the next phase in the law of our Constitution." -- Laurence Tribe
Laurence Henry Tribe (born in Shanghai, October 10, 1941) is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. He also serves as a consultant for the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
Tribe is widely recognized as a liberal scholar of constitutional law and as a practitioner before the Supreme Court of the United States. He is the author of American Constitutional Law (1978), a treatise in that field, and has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court 35 times.
Tribe attended Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, California. He holds an A.B. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Harvard College (1962), and a J.D., magna cum laude from Harvard Law School (1966). Tribe was a champion policy debater at Harvard, and later a college coach and high school summer institute teacher.
Career
Tribe served as a law clerk to Matthew Tobriner on the California Supreme Court from 1966-67, and as a law clerk to Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1967-68. He joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor in 1968, receiving tenure in 1972.
In addition to his record as a scholar, Tribe is noted for his extensive support of liberal legal causes. He has argued many high-profile cases, including one for Al Gore during the disputed U.S. presidential election, 2000. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Tribe's client in Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986, holding that a Georgia state law criminalizing sodomy, as applied to consensual acts between persons of the same sex, did not violate fundamental liberties under the principle of substantive due process. However, he was vindicated in 2003, when the Supreme Court overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas. He wrote the ACLU's amicus curiae brief supporting Lawrence, who was represented by Lambda Legal.
Tribe continues to strongly support liberal political causes. He is one of the co-founders of the liberal American Constitution Society, the law and policy organization formed to counter the conservative Federalist Society.
He actively supported the candidacy of President Barack Obama and described Obama as "the best student I ever had," a phrase he also used to describe Kathleen Sullivan. Alongside Harvard's Cass Sunstein, Tribe served as judicial adviser to Obama's campaign. In February 2010, he was named "Senior Counselor for Access to Justice" in the Department of Justice; he will lead an effort to increase legal access for the poor.
Tribe also represented General Electric in its defense against its liability under Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act ("Superfund"), in which GE and Tribe unsuccessfully argued that the act unconstitutionally violated General Electric's due process rights.
Plagiarism Scandal
In 2004, Tribe admitted to plagiarism after reports surfaced that material published by Tribe in 1985 was lifted from material originally published by Henry J. Abraham in 1974. The revelation came only three weeks after Charles J. Ogletree, one of Tribe's peers at the law school publicly confessed to plagiarism and sparked controversy when critics began to view these transgressions along with earlier incidents as evidence of a trend at Harvard Law. Six months later, after an investigation headed by former Harvard President Derek Bok, Harvard President Lawrence Summers and Law School Dean Elena Kagan reprimanded Tribe for "a significant lapse in proper academic practice", but concluded that Tribe's error was unintentional. Lawrence R. Velvel, Dean of Massachusetts School of Law and a professor of law, criticized Summers' and Kagan's statement, saying "Harvard University is now probably the only school in the country with a University Professor who is an admitted plagiarist."
