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Tribe's transgression had come to light only after he had publicly defended his colleague Ogletree, who just three weeks earlier had publicly apologized for the unauthorized heist of verbiage from Yale scholar Jack Balkin's book, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, and the stashing of it, nearly word-for-word, in his own book, All Deliberate Speed.

Appalled by Tribe's hypocrisy, an anonymous tipster alerted conservative scholar Joseph Bottum, who penned a damning 5,000 word article for The Weekly Standard, which revealed the extent of Tribe's theft and resulted in Tribe's half-hearted mea culpa.

In reviewing the case, Kagan and then Harvard President Larry Summers faced an obvious challenge: Ogletree was a black star on a faculty often criticized for being overly white; even more problematic, Tribe was the superstar of the judicial left.

Ogletree himself stayed out of trouble. In 1970, after high school, Ogletree enrolled in Stanford University outside San Francisco. His dormitory marked the first time he had ever had his own room. At college, Ogletree became dismayed by the elitism of the institution. Fortunately, he was also quite near the epicenter of the Black Power movement that had coalesced around San Francisco, the city of Oakland, and the University of California at Berkeley at that point in history. Ogletree became a campus radical, organizing an Afrocentric (though still integrated) dormitory, where he met his future wife, Pamela Barnes. He edited a campus Black Panther newspaper called The Real News and traveled to Africa and Cuba as part of student activist groups.

Ogletree’s first intensive experience in the courtroom sparked his intent to pursue trial law as a career. He attended nearly every day of the trial of Black Power activist and Communist Angela Davis. Some of parts of the Davis trial were tedious, Ogletree recalled in I've Known Rivers, but “the process and strategies were fascinating. I sat there wondering how they were going to tie all this together.” After graduating with a bachelor's degree in political science from Stanford in 1974, Ogletree stayed on a year to earn a master's degree. At the urging of his soon-to-be wife, he applied to Harvard Law School; the newlyweds moved to the Boston area upon his acceptance and enrollment in the fall of 1975. From the start, Ogletree recalled, he felt unease in the markedly different, monied East Coast enclave. Furthermore, the city was then in the middle of a vicious battle over busing that pitted its ethnic-American communities against the African-American populace. Academia itself was also especially tedious, and at one point he nearly quit the prestigious School of Law. “At Harvard the pressure was on, participation was mandatory, there was always a lot of competition and tension in the air,” Ogletree recalled in I've Known Rivers. He survived by closely allying himself with other African-American students and continued his political activism, even becoming national president of the Black Law Students Association.

Read more: Ogletree Charles Jr. Biography - Selected writings - Law, School, American, and African - JRank Articles http://biography.jrank.org/pages/2366/Ogletree-Jr-Charles.html#ixzz1ofJ7lITE

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If anyone asked Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. 20 years ago which member of the Obama family would wind up in national politics, he would have picked Michelle.

Ogletree first met Michelle Obama ’88 in the fall of 1985 when both arrived at Harvard Law School for the first time, she as a student and he as a visiting professor. As a student in his trial advocacy workshop, Ogletree says her commitment to public service was already clear.

“She made a commitment to her father, who did not go to college, that she would pursue her talents to help her community,” says Ogletree.

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HT: Weaselzippers

The home of Professor Charles Ogletree, a friend and former law school professor of President Barack Obama, is visible during a social event with the president in attendance in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., Saturday, Aug. 20, 2011.