Tribe To Lay Down The Law at College

He’s argued more than 33 cases before the Supreme Court, but star constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe ’62 may soon face his toughest crowd yet: a lecture hall jam-packed with Harvard undergrads.

More than 37 years after he joined Harvard Law School’s faculty, Tribe will teach an undergraduate course for the first time in the spring of 2007.

“I’m calling the course ‘Love and Death in American Law,’” Tribe, who holds the prestigious title of Loeb University Professor at Harvard, told The Crimson in a lengthy e-mail yesterday. He added that the class will fulfill one of the undergraduate Core requirements—most likely in the Social Analysis field.

The course “will examine how our state and federal systems of law, and especially our constitutional structures and rules, have over time framed and tried to resolve the issues raised by the most powerful human emotions and attachments,” Tribe wrote.

University President Lawrence H. Summers mentioned Tribe’s plans to teach the course in an interview with The Crimson on Tuesday. “I think that in general we are increasing access for Harvard College students to key figures outside the Arts and Sciences faculty,” Summers said.

Tribe wrote that his only previous experience teaching undergrads came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he served as Harvard’s debate coach. (Tribe won the National Debate Tournament as an undergrad math concentrator in 1961 and has been credited with pioneering the “flow” technique for tracking debate arguments.)

Tribe wrote that his course will consider a range of issues connected to conception and pregnancy—from in vitro fertilization and surrogate parenthood to embryonic stem cell research and abortion.

Tribe—who represented a gay client convicted under a Georgia state sodomy law in the landmark 1986 Supreme Court case of Bowers v. Hardwick—wrote that the course would tackle issues related to marriage rights and same-sex weddings.

Finally, the course will consider an array of end-of-life issues, including physician-assisted suicide, organ donation, and treatment of the dead.

Though the syllabus will certainly include major Supreme Court decisions, Tribe wrote that “the course will include much more than strictly legal sources because much of what I think sheds light on these ultimate matters takes a literary form, including both poetry and prose narrative; social and political analysis; moral philosophy; historical and anthropological study; or biomedical writing for generally educated non-specialists.”

Tribe is the author of the treatise “American Constitutional Law,” which was first published in 1978 and has been cited in more than 60 Supreme Court decisions since then, according to the Washington, D.C.-based weekly Legal Times.

Tribe also represented then-Vice President Al Gore ’69 in the legal battle over the 2000 Florida recount.

Among the thousands of students who have taken Tribe’s course on the Constitution at the Law School is Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ’76.

Tribe wrote that his interest in teaching the new undergrad course “was sparked by the remarkable joy of being alive; of experiencing many kinds of love, including love for the woman to whom I’ve been married for a long time and for the children we have had together; of watching people I love die; of thinking and teaching about abortion, same-sex marriage, and the right to physician-assisted suicide; and of dreaming about pulling all of that together in an exploratory way with bright young people....”

He wrote that the class “shouldn’t overlap particularly” with either of the two undergrad courses focusing on the Constitution that Law School faculty members are teaching this term. Morton J. Horwitz, who holds the Warren chair in American legal history, is teaching a Historical Study-A course tracing the Constitution from 1788 to the present. And Richard H. Fallon, who holds the Tyler chair in constitutional law, is teaching Government 1510, “American Constitutional Law.”

Fallon, who sat in on Tribe’s constitutional law class for a semester in the mid-1980s, said that “Harvard students should be thrilled” by Tribe’s new course offering.

“History, physics, and literature all get mixed into his constitutional law class,” Fallon said.

After hearing about the subjects Tribe plans to cover, Fallon added, “I can’t imagine any student who would say, ‘I know all about that stuff from having taken Fallon’s course.’”

Tribe won the Sacks-Freund Prize for Teaching Excellence, awarded on the basis of a vote by law students, in 2000.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.