PERSON: Laurence Tribe

Professor Emeritus

Harvard University

Laurence Henry Tribe (born October 10, 1941) is an American legal scholar who is a University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He previously served as the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School.

A constitutional law scholar, Tribe is co-founder of the American Constitution Society. He is also the author of American Constitutional Law (1978), a major treatise in that field, and has argued before the United States Supreme Court 36 times. Tribe was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010.

Tribe was born in 1941 in Shanghai, which was then part of the Republic of China but had been taken over by the Empire of Japan in 1937 following the Battle of Shanghai. He was the son of Paulina (née Diatlovitsky) and George Israel Tribe. His family is Jewish. His father was from Poland and his mother was born in Harbin to immigrants from Eastern Europe. Tribe spent his early years in the French Concession of Shanghai before his family immigrated to the United States when he was six years old. His family settled in San Francisco, and he attended Abraham Lincoln High School.

After graduating from high school in 1958 at age 16, Tribe went to Harvard University, where he majored in mathematics and was a member of the Harvard Debate Team that won the intercollegiate National Debate Tournament in 1961. He graduated from Harvard in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude.

Tribe then received a National Science Foundation fellowship to pursue doctoral studies in mathematics at Harvard, but dropped out after one year. He decided to attend the Harvard Law School instead, where he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. He graduated from Harvard Law in 1966 with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude.

Tribe married Carolyn Ricarda Kreye in 1964. They divorced in 2008. Their two children, Mark and Kerry, are visual artists.

On May 22, 2013, he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Columbia University during its Class of 2013 commencement.

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