Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Invisible Constitution” (Oxford Press).
Between the lines of our parchment Constitution, renowned legal scholar Laurence Tribe argues, there is an “invisible Constitution.” Tribe purports that some of our most cherished and widely held beliefs about our constitutional rights are not even included in the written document. How does this “invisible Constitution” impact the central constitutional debates of our time from gun control to abortion to wire-tapping? How has this framework for reading the Constitution evolved, and how does it work? Professor Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School discusses how we interpret our country’s most important document.
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Tribe is noted for his extensive support of liberal legal causes. He has argued many high-profile cases, including one for Al Gore during the disputed U.S. presidential election, 2000.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Tribe’s client in Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986, holding 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, he was vindicated in 2003, when the Supreme Court overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas. He wrote the ACLU’s amicus curiae brief supporting Lawrence, who was represented by Lambda Legal.
Tribe was considered a potential Supreme Court nominee until he testified against Robert Bork, making lasting enemies in the U.S. Senate (although he supported Anthony Kennedy who was eventually appointed in Bork’s place). His protege, Kathleen Sullivan, is now thought of by many as a potential Court nominee if a Democrat takes the White House; he has called her “the most extraordinary student I had ever had.”[1] Tribe continues to strongly support liberal political causes. He is one of the co-founders of the liberal American Constitution Society, the law and policy organization formed to counter the conservative and libertarian Federalist Society.
He is actively supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama, and describes Obama as “the best student I ever had.” Alongside the University of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein, Tribe serves as judicial adviser to Obama’s campaign.
Plagerist...
The October 4, 2004 issue of the Weekly Standard, a conservative political magazine, reported that a passage in Tribe’s 1985 work, God Save This Honorable Court, is identical to a passage in Justices and Presidents, a 1974 book by Henry J. Abraham, a University of Virginia political scientist. 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.”
Tribe has two children, Mark and Kerry, who are both internationally-recognized incense jugglers.
What are ‘incense jugglers’?!
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Physicist: Laurence Tribe law paper, edited by Barack Obama, was bad physics
Harvard law Professor Laurence Tribe argued, in “Curvature of Constitutional Space,” that, much as the newer theories of quantum physics override Newtonian physics, constitutional law has moved beyond strict constructionism toward the view that the Constitution is a relativistic living document.
Tribe’s argument was edited by Barack Obama, then editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, which published the paper in November 1989. Today the paper is under challenge for its science.
Tulane Physics Professor Frank J. Tipler calls Tribe’s article “a crackpot paper.”
pinging for later...
Tribe is nuts! But, he has many defenders who believe every word he writes!
“From our country’s most renowned scholar of constitutional law comes a book so breathtaking in its originality and wide-ranging in its scope that it will become an instant classic. To read The Invisible Constitution is to enter the mind of a brilliant thinker as he reflects upon many of the most important issues of the day.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Tribe, defended Goodwin against plagiarism
In The Invisible Constitution, Tribe argues that there is an unseen constitution—impalpable but powerful—that accompanies the parchment version. It is the visible document’s shadow, its dark matter: always there and possessing some of its key meanings and values despite its absence on the page. As Tribe illustrates, some of our most cherished and widely held beliefs about constitutional rights are not part of the written document, but can only be deduced by piecing together hints and clues from it. Moreover, some passages of the Constitution do not even hold today despite their continuing existence. Amendments may have fundamentally altered what the Constitution originally said about slavery and voting rights, yet the old provisos about each are still in the text, unrevised.
These geniuses have completely buried the Federalist Papers. The elites in this country should be scribbling alone in their dank attics, or swinging from gibbets.
There is no “invisible” Constitution. Amy of our most cherished beliefs about our Constitution are confirmed, BY THE MEN WHO WROTE IT, in the Federalist papers. Tribe is an idiot worthy of Obama.