Quote
"This book must... touch... deep and difficult questions about birth and death... life and its inception... sexuality and gender, about distribution of power."
Laurence Tribe[I]ts easy to forget how much difference the public face of the Suprem — Laurence Tribe
"[I]ts easy to forget how much difference the public face of the Supreme Court can make in advancing a humane and yet suitably cautious conception of the rule of law and the role of courts in the pursuit of justice. Thats a facet of the Courts role to which few justices over our history have made much of a contribution, given the significant limits on what a sitting justice can suitably say in a public forum. Louis Brandeis, Earl Warren, and Robert Jackson might be cited as exceptions. David Souter certainly couldnt be credited with success in that role, although the conspicuous modesty of his personal style was a plus... Elena Kagan would, however, combine that personal modesty with an appealing public persona and would project a well-grounded image of justice as fairness and of law as codified common sense. In that regard... a Justice Kagan would be a much more formidable match for Justice Scalia than Justice Breyer has been—and certainly than a Justice Sotomayor or a Justice Wood could be—in the kinds of public settings in which it has been all too easy for Scalia to make his rigid and unrealistic formalism seem synonymous with the rule of law and to make Breyers pragmatism seem mushy and unconstrained by comparison. It is important... for the simultaneously progressive and yet principled, pragmatic and yet constrained, approach to law and justice that you have espoused... since becoming president, to be embodied in the person and voice of your first Supreme Court nominee. Elena Kagan would personify that approach and would ultimately be seen by the American public to exemplify it."
Laurence Tribe
Laurence Tribe
author
Laurence Henry Tribe is an American legal scholar known for his studies of United States constitutional law. Tribe was a professor at Harvard Law School from 1968 until his retirement in 2020. He currently holds the position of Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus.
More by Laurence Tribe
View all →Laurence TribeQuote
"I think it very important that you view the vacancy created by Justice Souters resignation as an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a series of appointments that will gradually move the Court in a pragmatically progressive direction. Neither Steve Breyer nor Ruth Ginsburg has much of a purchase on Tony Kennedys mind. David Souter did, and it will take a similarly precise intellect, wielded by someone with a similarly deep appreciation of history and a similarly broad command of legal doctrine, to prevent Kennedy from drifting in a direction that is both formalistic and right-leaning on matters of equal protection and personal liberty."
Laurence TribeQuote
"[T]he courts that held slaves to be non-persons, separate to be equal, and pregnancy to be non sex-related can hardly be deemed either final or infallible."
Laurence TribeQuote
"Judicial neutrality necessarily involves taking sides. ...[J]udicial restraint is but another form of judicial activism."
Laurence TribeQuote
"[T]he highest mission of the Supreme Court... is not to conserve judicial credibility, but in the Constitutions own phrase, "to form a more perfect Union" between right and rights within the charters necessarily evolutionary design."
Laurence TribeQuote
"[T]hat speech... was political genius but jurisprudential danger, because he created an impression that Robert Bork really liked the idea of coat-hanger abortions, that he liked the idea of racial separation of neighborhoods, whereas the fact is that Bork’s philosophy might have led to many of those consequences, but to demonize him the way my friend Ted Kennedy did I thought was going to work politically, but something that people would come to regret later. And, of course, I think that’s what happened, because it rallied a lot of academics and scholars and moderates to Bork’s side, thinking that he had been improperly caricatured..."
Laurence Tribe