Laurence Tribe facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Laurence Tribe
|
|
|---|---|
Tribe in 2019
|
|
| Born |
Laurence Henry Tribe
October 10, 1941 |
| Education | Harvard University (BA, JD) |
| Awards | American Philosophical Society’s Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence (2013) |
| Scientific career | |
| Notable students | Barack Obama Ted Cruz John Roberts Elena Kagan Merrick Garland Kathleen Sullivan Jamie Raskin Adam Schiff |
| Influences |
|
Laurence Henry Tribe (born October 10, 1941) is an American legal scholar who is a University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He previously served as the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School.
A constitutional law scholar, Tribe is co-founder of the American Constitution Society. He is also the author of American Constitutional Law (1978), a major treatise in that field, and has argued before the United States Supreme Court 36 times. Tribe was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010.
Personal life and education
Tribe was born in 1941 in Shanghai, which was then part of the Republic of China but had been taken over by the Empire of Japan in 1937 following the Battle of Shanghai. He was the son of Paulina (née Diatlovitsky) and George Israel Tribe. His family is Jewish. His father was from Poland and his mother was born in Harbin to immigrants from Eastern Europe. Tribe spent his early years in the French Concession of Shanghai before his family immigrated to the United States when he was six years old. His family settled in San Francisco, and he attended Abraham Lincoln High School.
After graduating from high school in 1958 at age 16, Tribe went to Harvard University, where he majored in mathematics and was a member of the Harvard Debate Team that won the intercollegiate National Debate Tournament in 1961. He graduated from Harvard in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude.
Tribe then received a National Science Foundation fellowship to pursue doctoral studies in mathematics at Harvard, but dropped out after one year. He decided to attend the Harvard Law School instead, where he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. He graduated from Harvard Law in 1966 with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude.
Tribe married Carolyn Ricarda Kreye in 1964. They divorced in 2008. Their two children, Mark and Kerry, are visual artists.
On May 22, 2013, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Columbia University during its Class of 2013 commencement.
Career
After graduating from law school, Tribe clerked for justice Mathew Tobriner of the Supreme Court of California from 1966 to 1967, then for justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1967 to 1968. He then joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor, receiving tenure in 1972. Among his law students and research assistants while on the faculty at Harvard have been former President Barack Obama (a research assistant for over two years), Chief Justice John Roberts, US Senator Ted Cruz, former D.C. Circuit Chief Judge and Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Other notable students of Tribe were U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and lead manager for the first Impeachment of Donald Trump, and Jamie Raskin, lead manager for the second Donald Trump impeachment.
In 1978, Tribe published the first version of what has become one of the core texts on its subject, American Constitutional Law. It has since been updated and expanded a number of times.
Tribe was part of Al Gore's legal team regarding the results of the 2000 United States presidential election. Due to the close nature of the vote count, recounts had been initiated in Florida, and the recounts had been challenged in court. Tribe argued the initial case in Federal Court in Miami in which they successfully argued that the court should not stop the recount of the votes which was taking place and scheduled to take place in certain counties.
Since the mid-1990s, Tribe has represented a number of corporations advocating for their free speech rights and constitutional personhood.
On September 25, 2020, Tribe was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent monitoring group over Facebook.
Political involvement
Tribe is one of the co-founders of the liberal American Constitution Society, the law and policy organization formed to counter the conservative Federalist Society, and is one of a number of scholars at Harvard Law School who have expressed their support for animal rights.
Tribe served as a judicial adviser to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. In February 2010, he was named "Senior Counselor for Access to Justice" in the Department of Justice. He resigned eight months later, citing health reasons.
In December 2016, Tribe and notable lawyers Lawrence Lessig and Andrew Dhuey established The Electors Trust under the aegis of Equal Citizens to provide pro bono legal counsel as well as a secure communications platform for those of the 538 members of the United States Electoral College who were considering a vote of conscience against Donald Trump in the presidential election.
Tribe is on the board of the Renew Democracy Initiative, an American political organization founded in 2017 to promote and defend liberal democracy in the U.S. and abroad.
