Hi! I'm Larry.

"Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous --
Almost, at times, the Fool."

Hi! I'm Larry. I've written about, taught,and practiced constitutional law for many years, having joined the Harvard law faculty in the fall of 1968, just before I turned 27.

In a future life, I think I might try astronomy or astrophysics, or maybe even pure math, which was my favorite subject in college and grad school.

I still love reading about the search for a unified TOE, although I can't really pretend to know a superstring from a supernova. Stuff about black holes interests me, in the end, more than stuff about corporate (or even, at times, constitutional) law.

But law too has its deep structures and amazing symmetries, and I find an elegant constitutional argument almost as inspiring as an elegant mathematical proof. I do despair, though, of ever discovering eternal truths in the social sciences, and when I'm in a truth-obsessed mode, I despair of ever finding in the world of law any proposition half as remarkable as, say, the fact that:

e to the i Pi = -1

I love brilliant magenta sunsets, unagi, Martin Amis' "Time's Arrow, the fish tank at MGH, T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," eating, my stairmaster, looking at the ocean, dreaming about impossible things, New Yorker cartoons, the twist in a short story, The Hotel New Hampshire, good (and even not-so-good) movies, re-reading The Great Gatsby and Ethan Fromme, and Monet and Vermeer.

I particularly like Bellini's "St. Francis of Assisi" at the Frick in Manhattan. I love Mozart, Simon & Garfunkel and Joan Baez, who played at the Mount Auburn Club in 1961.

I have been having a great time (after much initial hemming and hawing) with my PC and even my Zaurus and would love to see what's wrought by science and technology over the next couple of centuries.

I'm something of a political news junkie, but I am fairly disillusioned with politics in the 1990s. I am nonetheless anything but apolitical (although my legal views are much less result-oriented and certainly less politically driven than some people seem to suppose).

Having said that, I should stress that I despise injustice and human suffering and want to do my part to help overcome both, but, in the end, I think I can do more through seeing connections and deepening people's understanding than through direct service. That's why teaching and working on the third edition of my treatise, American Constitutional Law, due out in the year 2000, mean a lot to me.

Nothing means more to me, though, than my kids Mark and Kerry and my wife Carolyn. I love them all more than life itself. And, as for life, sometimes I love it, and sometimes, frankly, I don't.

* * * * *

Well, that was easy. You see, I've never had a weblog before, so to be sure I got this off to a good start, I decided to start with something already quite polished. I simply copied the above material.

I know what you’re thinking. Don't worry! No, it’s not the sort of thing that led those irritating Harvard law students to poke fun at me in their recent parody. See here, here, and here, but please don’t bother with the material posted by some insane clown here. You see, I copied the material from myself -- from my own website. I wrote the material back in the 1990s, which is why it may seem a bit dated. It was on my home page among the dozens of pages on my family's website.

You may be wondering why I'd post that sort of stuff as a home page. Well, it's my son's fault. As I explained in an e-mail to Jeff Rosen, a journalist friend of mine, the website “was a thing our son helped Carolyn and me put together one Christmas.” On my home page, at my son's insistence, "I was having fun, letting my hair down, as it were, in just chatting about myself as unselfconsciously as I could, not giving much of a thought to who might read it but probably assuming, naively it now seems, that it wouldn't really be of interest to anybody."

As it turned out, it was of interest to somebody, actually, to a lot of people, as Jeff mentioned in the article he wrote about the tendency of people like me to strip themselves naked (figuratively speaking -- don’t worry!) by revealing intimate personal details on the Internet. So how did I feel when I learned of all that interest? Well, as I recounted in my e-mail to Jeff: "When I learned that people were finding it a source of public amusement, I do admit to being nonplussed and unsure what to do."

Ultimately I decided to take down my home page. That turned out to be a mistake. For one thing, it was completely ineffective in removing my home page from public scrutiny and ridicule, as various people posted copies of it on the Internet. For another, after everyone had a bit of fun at my expense "for displaying" on my home page "the overly intimate tones of a personal ad," as Jeff mentioned in his article, "Tribe was then ridiculed more for his attempt to cover his tracks than for his initial act of self-exposure."

But I can certainly take my share of ribbing, even ridicule, for my willingness to disclose intimate details about my personal and family life on the Internet. "Many citizens, of course, don't care if they embarrass themselves before strangers on the internet, as the proliferation of personal websites shows," as Jeff also mentioned. Take, for example, my good friend Alex ("The Easy Rider") Kozinski, who’s built a solid career as a judge out west, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circus. For some background on Alex, I recommend this article in "Legal Affairs", whose cover carried this photo of Alex in his judicial outfit, more unique even than that of Chief Justice Rehnquist (President Bush, if you're looking for someone with a bit of flair, Alex would make a great chief justice):

Among his many accomplishments, Alex, always quite the ladies' man, was the first Article III judge to meet his wife on a reality television program, as you can see for yourself from the clip of his appearance on "The Dating Game" which you can find here, courtesy of Alex. And if you're interested in a video of Alex bungee-jumping, click here (make sure you have the sound turned on; it's awesome!).

If you're interested in Alex's "Matrix" look, check out this photo spread in George magazine from 1995, four years before "The Matrix" was released. Here's one of my favorites:

If you're interested in photos of Alex on a snowboarding trip, check out this photo spread in Snow County magazine. Here's one of my favorites (I think he was offering his considered opinion of "penumbral" rights):

Did you know Alex took a sabbatical from his judgeship to reenlist in the Marines and fight in the Gobal War on Terrorism? He received combat medals for service both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here's a photo a buddy of his took of him taking a break after he personally captured Saddam Hussein:

And somehow, squeezed in between all his other duties, Alex manages to churn out movie reviews at a pretty rapid clip.

I strongly suspect Alex is the author of the pseudonymous blog, “Underneath Their Robes,” which sets forth most of the personal material about Alex to which I just linked. It is remarkable the degree to which pseudonymous or anonymous blogs, and even blogs impersonating and/or parodying people, are taking hold on the Internet these days.

Jeff, maybe you should write your next essay about Alex. Whatever I write in this weblog, I'll be hard pressed to match Alex as far as acts of self-exposure designed to liberate oneself by having details about one's life circulated amongst total strangers.

Nor is Alex the only prominent public figure with a penchant for self exposure. Take, for example, my good friend Dick (“The Giant Hedgehog”) Posner. Or my good friend David (“The Haymaker”) Boies (who coincidentally was given that nickname during the 2000 Bush v. Gore litigation by another good friend of mine, Ron Klain). Both have a tendency to reveal rather personal details in their public interviews and writings, which I’ll likely revisit in future posts.

In some small way, I find the societal value of such acts of self-exposure confirmed by the fact that after I took down my home page, one of my friends at FreeRepublic.com decided it was of too much historical importance to allow it to vanish forever, and lovingly preserved it here, and even gave it a nice plug here. Which is good, because I couldn't find a copy on my computer, so that's where I copied it from.

Not a lot has changed in my life since the 1990s, so to update you there's not much I need to add to the paragraphs above copied from my old home page.

I still love the same things I mentioned on my home page. I’ll probably talk more about a bunch of my favorite things in future posts.

As my students can attest based on the diagrams I hand out in class, I still think law has deep structures and amazing symmetries.

I still find an elegant constitutional argument almost as inspiring as an elegant mathematical proof.

I'm still something of a political news junkie, and I'm still fairly disillusioned with politics -- more so lately than ever.

I'm still politically driven, but still not nearly as much as people suppose, and I'm still less result-oriented than people suppose.

I still despise injustice and human suffering, although lately I've been spending more time on the animal rights movement and on animal suffering than on human suffering. "Nonhuman animals," like my good friends Simba and Jerome, are people, too (though I must admit that at times those chimps can be difficult to reason with). The logical consequence of my argument, as Dick has pointed out, is that it would be worse to kill 101 people like Simba and Jerome than to kill, for example, this fellow whose home page really isn't a whole lot different than my old home page. Dick is pretty sharp; I'm still thinking about that one.

I'm still helping people see connections and deepening their understanding by teaching at Harvard Law School, and by working on the third edition of my treatise.

That third edition of my is still due out in the year 2000, which means it's now five years overdue. If you've been keeping tabs on the buzz between librarians and my publisher, you know a couple of years ago, I was a little behind on it, and now I'm way behind on it -- so far behind, even my publisher has no clue when it will come out. But helping other people see connections, by working hard to complete that third edition, still means a lot to me.

To speed things up and get that third edition finished as soon as possible, and taking a cue from the Iraq war about the dangers of underestimating the number of "boots on the ground" needed to get the job done, I've doubled the number of students I have writing the book for me, from the 32 students who wrote the second edition of my treatise (you can find their names in footnote 1 of the preface; just ask them about all the great writing they did!) to the present force strength of 64 student "research" assistants who are writing the third edition.

Don't worry about the quality-control problem I recently experienced with a book I had a first-year law student write for me in 1985 (see here). None of the students writing the third edition of my treatise are first-year law students. They're all second-year students or beyond. Some of them have even taken a constitutional law class.

And of course, my kids and wife still mean more to me than life itself. Though that still doesn't say much, because I still have the same mental state about life I had back in the 1990s: "sometimes I love it, and sometimes, frankly, I don't." At least when I forget to take my medication.

There is one major development since the 1990s. A few months ago I was named "The Big Mahatma of American law." That honor was bestowed upon me in The Weekly Standard, which in the issue dated October 4, 2004, carried an article entitled "The Big Mahatma," by my good friend Joseph Bottum. In it, Professor Henry J. Abraham, a venerable historian of the U.S. Supreme Court, based on his review of a book I authored in his field in 1985, called me "a big mahatma." You can read Jody's article online here.

The Weekly Standard itself went even further than Professor Abraham, saying: "Tribe is the big mahatma of American law as well as the great legal champion of the Democratic party." They say any press coverage is good press coverage. Well, you can't buy press coverage like that.

Even more recently, in the pages of The Harvard Crimson I was described as "America's leading and most creative constitutional scholar.” Even more recently, in the pages of The Record, the student newspaper at Harvard Law School, I was described as "the leading thinker in the domain of constitutional law," one who has produced "a mountain of paradigm-shifting writing" in the course of a "career of original and progressive intellection" for which my profession and the nation are "justly grateful."

I really appreciate having such praise lavished on me, particularly by impartial people writing in our Harvard campus newspapers. And I must say referring to me as a "mahatma" is apt. "Mahatma" is a Hindu term of respect for a sage, someone with knowledge and powers of a higher order than those of ordinary men, with a liberated soul. As you can see from the material from my old home page reprinted above, I believe in reincarnation and am already thinking what to do in my next life. So all in all, to use a Hindu term of respect for someone with a liberated soul to describe me is perfect.

So "The Big Mahatma" it is. I thank Henry Abraham and Joseph Bottum for giving me that nickname. Not bad at all. It's certainly a better nickname than the one a fellow professor gave Dick Posner, aka "The Giant Hedgehog." Alas, it's not nearly as cool a nickname as the one Alex Kozinski gave himself, “The Easy Rider.” Maybe I should have tried to think up a nickname for myself cooler than Alex's before Henry and Jody did it for me.

At any rate, here I am, "The Big Mahatma" unplugged! You can be sure that the rest of my posts on this blog will be written in the same zany, zestful spirit of the home page for which I became so famous a few years back.

Ciao!

Laurence ("The Big Mahatma") Tribe
J. Alfred Prufrock University Professor
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
thebigmahatma@yahoo.com