Why did Larry Tribe become a ConLaw Professor?

October 23rd, 2014

In a series of video interviews with SCOTUSBlog, Harvard Law Professors offers these thoughts about why he chose constitutional law–with the presumption that he could have done anything else:

“People ask, ‘Why did you pick constitutional law?’  I mean, come on.  Who, with a real opportunity to dig into a subject of law would not want that to be constitutional law?  It has everything.  It has history.  It has moral philosophy.  The meaning of liberty, of equality, of dignity.  It has legal technicalities galore.  It has precedent.  It involves strategy, dealing with complicated human situations and the people who are affected by law, and the human dynamics of complicated institutions like the U.S. Supreme Court.”

A disproportionate share of aspiring law professors want to teach constitutional law, for many of the reasons Tribe suggests. A very small number of them will ever be able to claim one of the few ConLaw lecterns–among the most coveted.