“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.