Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor.
Career
He is generally recognized as one of the foremost constitutional law experts in the nation, and has argued before the Supreme Court three dozen times. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College in Mathematics (1962) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School (1966). Tribe is the author of "American Constitutional Law", one of the leading textbooks in that field.
Tribe is regarded by many as one of the most brilliant legal minds, and noted for his extensive support of liberal legal causes. Tribe has argued many high profile cases, including those for Al Gore during the disputed U.S. presidential election, 2000. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Tribe in Bowers v. Hardwick in 1987, which ruled that a Georgia state law criminalizing "sodomy" (oral or anal sex), as applied to consensual acts between persons of the same sex, did not violate fundamental liberties under the principle of substantive due process. However, Tribe was vindicated in 2003, when the Supreme Court overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas, though Tribe did not argue that case.
Plagiarism accusations
In the October 4, 2004 issue of the Weekly Standard it was revealed that several passages in Tribe's 1985 work, "God Save This Honorable Court," were copied without proper attribution from the 1974 book Justices and Presidents, written by University of Virginia political scientist Henry J. Abraham. On April 13, 2005, Harvard's President Lawrence Summers and Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan released a statement that Tribe's admitted failure to provide appropriate attribution was a "significant lapse in proper academic practice," but that they regarded the error as "the product of inadvertence rather than intentionality."
Many liberals -- including Tribe's Harvard friend and colleague Alan Dershowitz -- accuse conservatives of having a vendetta against Tribe because his book "God Save this Honorable Court" corralled the U.S. Senate into action and may have frustrated some of the judicial appointments of Ronald Reagan.
Policy Debate
Tribe was a champion policy debater for Harvard University and later a college coach and high school summer institute teacher. He is often credited for inventing the modern "flow" system of recording arguments which increases the rate of speaking speed in the activity.
Books
- American Constitutional Law (textbook)
- Constitutional Choices
- On Reading the Constitution
- God Save This Honorable Court: How the Choice of Supreme Court Justices Shapes Our History
- Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes
- Constitutional Structure of American Government
- Constitutional Protection of Individual Rights
- Five Reigning Myths About Constitutionalism and Judicial Review