page_title: Laurence Tribe
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Laurence Tribe / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Tribe testifying to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987
context_page_description: Laurence Henry Tribe is an American legal scholar who is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at the Harvard Law School of Harvard University. Tribe's scholarship focuses on American constitutional law. He also works with the firm Massey & Gail LLP on a variety of matters.
  Tribe is a constitutional law scholar and co-founder of the American Constitution Society. He is the author of American Constitutional Law, a major treatise in that field, and has argued before the United States Supreme Court 36 times.
context_section_description: Tribe served as a law clerk to Mathew 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. Among his law students and research assistants while on the faculty at Harvard have been President Barack Obama (a research assistant for two years), Chief Justice John Roberts (as a law student in his classes), US Senator Ted Cruz, Chief Judge and Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan (as a research assistant). Another notable research assistant for Tribe was U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and lead manager for the Impeachment of Donald Trump.
  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.
  In 1983 Tribe represented Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon in the appeal of his federal conviction on income tax charges.
  Tribe represented  the restaurant Grendel's Den in the case Larkin v Grendel's Den in which the restaurant challenged a Massachusetts law which allowed religious establishments to prohibit liquor sales in neighboring properties. The case reached the United States Supreme Court in 1982 where the court overturned the law as violating of the separation of church and state. The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well criticizes the opening of his brief as a "thicket of confusing citations and unnecessary definitions" stating that it would have been "measurably strengthened" if he had used the "more lively imagery" that he had used in a footnote later in the document.
  In the 1985 National Gay Task Force v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, Tribe represented the National Gay Task Force who had won an Appeals Court ruling against an Oklahoma law that would have allowed schools to fire teachers who were attracted to people of the same sex or spoke in favor of civil rights for LGBT people. The Supreme Court deadlocked which left the Appeals Court's favorable ruling in place, declaring the law would have violated the First Amendment.
  The Supreme Court ruled against Tribe's client in Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986 and held 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, in 2003 the Supreme Court overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas, a case for which Tribe wrote the ACLU's amicus curiae brief supporting Lawrence, who was represented by Lambda Legal.
  Tribe testified at length during the Senate confirmation hearings in 1987 about the Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination, arguing that Bork's stand on the limitation of rights in the Constitution would be unique in the history of the Court. His participation in the hearings raised his profile outside of the legal realm and he became a target of right-wing critics. His phone was later found to have been wiretapped, but it was never discovered who had placed the device or why.
  Tribe's 1990 book Abortion: Clash of Absolutes, was called "informative, lucidly written and cogently reasoned" in a review in the Journal of the American Bar Association.
  In 1992, Tribe reargued Cipollone v. Liggett Group, Inc., before the Supreme Court on behalf of the Liggett tobacco company.
  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. David Boies argued for the Gore team in a related matter in the Florida State Courts regarding the dates that Secretary of State of Fl
caption: Tribe in 1987
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