Laurence H. Tribe

As the child of two Russian-Jewish immigrant parents in 1940s Shanghai, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 was no stranger to injustice, a reality that set off his interest in law at an early age.

Living under the rule of imperial Japan, Tribe’s father found himself suddenly arrested after the United States declared war on Japan in December of 1941. As an “alien national,” his only crime was having become a U.S. citizen twenty years ago.

“My sense of what seemed to me the injustice of that imprisonment—after all, he’d done nothing wrong—gave me a lifelong commitment to justice and to the rule of law,” Tribe wrote in an email.

In 1963, one year after graduating from Harvard College, Tribe enrolled in Harvard Law School. Less than a decade later, he had earned tenure at the school, where he would go on to teach future President Barack Obama, Chief Justice John G. Roberts ’76, Justice Elena Kagan, and Congressman Barney Frank ’61-’62.

Despite his long-held interests in issues of justice, few who knew Tribe as an undergraduate had any idea that he was destined for a career in law. In college, Tribe was a brilliant mathematician, earning summa on his senior thesis. And in his spare time, he was an artist focusing mainly on what he described as “pastel seascapes and portraits and drawings of real nudes.”

THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR

When Tribe first stepped onto campus as a freshman at the age of 16, he found Harvard to be an eye-opening experience. Neither of his parents had attended college, and, given his humble background, Tribe never attended “a fancy high school,” as he put it.

As a result, the young Tribe was awed by the wide array of new intellectual opportunities he could pursue, as well as “all the amazing women I felt too young to be taken seriously by.”

“I have more fond memories than I could possibly recite in a finite period,” Tribe wrote.

Tribe excelled in his academic studies as an undergraduate, friends remembered. He was especially adept at mathematics, enrolling in graduate courses in the department beginning sophomore year.

“Mind you, he was smarter than practically everyone else we knew in college,” said Stephen M. Jacoby ’62, who lived with Tribe in Greenough during their freshman year.

Friends who knew Tribe said their talented classmate could have succeeded in a number of post-graduate careers. His only defect, Jacoby pointed out, was his absent-mindedness.

“He couldn’t keep track of his debate cards, of simple things like the raincoat,” Jacoby said. “It was the epitome of an absent-minded professor, only he was still quite young at the time.”

THE GREAT DEBATER

Despite concentrating in mathematics, Tribe sustained his interest in law and public policy issues by joining Harvard’s debate team his freshman year.

“Certainly he’d gotten hooked on some of these big public policy issues,” said David L. Mack ’62, one of Tribe’s teammates on the debate team.

“I give him credit for inventing modern debate,” said Albert W. Alschuler ’62, a law professor at Northwestern University and Tribe’s sophomore year debate partner.

As the two were walking down Mass. Ave. one day, Tribe spotted a large sketch pad in the window of an art-supply store, Alshuler remembered. Tribe drew a line down the middle of the pad and used both sides keep track of the two arguments in a competition—a practice still used by debaters today.

That year, Alschuler and Tribe made it to the quarterfinals of the national debate tournament. The very next year, Tribe and another classmate went on to capture the national debate championship.

“He [became] one of the top debaters on the college circuit,” Mack said.

But Tribe’s love of public policy issues extended beyond the debate tournament circuit. Jacoby and Mack, who also roomed with Tribe in graduate school, both recalled often staying up late at night in their rooms debating public policy issues with him.

A LIBERAL AT HEART

After college, Tribe studied mathematics at Harvard for one year on a National Science Foundation fellowship before he suddenly switched fields and enrolled at the Law School.

According to Alschuler, Tribe’s graduate school roommate, it was the brilliance of fellow classmate and future logician Saul A. Kripke ’62 that convinced Tribe that he could not reach his full potential as a mathematician.

“Larry decided he could never be as good at math as Saul was, but he could easily be as good at law as I was,” Alschuler said.

“I realized that I wanted to do something with more chance of improving people’s lives and that I really wouldn’t make a major impact in the field [of math],” Tribe explained.

And in his career as a legal scholar, Tribe has achieved this level of great influence, particularly in the field of constitutional law. He has appeared before the Supreme Court 35 times, and his 1978 book “American Constitutional Law” was called “the closest thing to a definitive treatise” by The New York Times.

In particular, Tribe is renowned for his support of liberal causes. In the 1986 Supreme Court Case Bowers v. Hardwick, Tribe argued for his client against a Georgia anti-sodomy law.

According to Tribe, his firm belief in racial, gender, and sexual equality, as well as economic justice, have not changed throughout his career.

“I think it has a lot to do with seeing people suffer unjustly as I was growing up,” Tribe wrote.

Mack pointed to a debate trip to the South during their sophomore year as one event that deeply affected Tribe’s commitment to equal rights.

As Tribe traveled to the South for the first time as with his teammates—including Mack and Alschuler—he found himself often using segregated public restrooms and debating at universities that were either still segregated or having trouble adjusting to the recent desegregation of public schools.

“All of us probably started the trip with a liberal view of the race issue, but it is fair to say that we did not feel its emotional weight,” Mack wrote in an email. “That trip probably helped form Larry’s liberal view on equal rights and opportunity under the law.”

—Staff writer Kevin J. Wu can be reached at kwu@college.harvard.edu.