In my last year of law school I took Constitutional Law from Laurence Tribe, the professor who was most recently
in the news for representing Al Gore before the Supreme Court in Bush
v. Gore. Even back then -- almost twenty years ago now -- Tribe was
famous and influential. It was the beginning of the Reagan era,
when conservative judges and legislators were beginning to make changes
in the law that shocked and depressed most members of the Harvard legal
community. In one class near the end of that year, some student asked
Tribe a pointed question: "Shouldn't you be speaking up more --
using your fame and influence to help prevent some of these awful things
from happening?" I still think about the answer he gave. Tribe
is an amazing speaker -- his most off-the-cuff remarks are more polished
than most of what you see in print -- and I can't do
justice here to his exact words. But he basically said that, regardless
of how much or little influence you may have, your first responsibility
is to think for yourself, and to be careful about getting too much into
one camp or another. He said that we might be surprised at how much the
political landscape shifts over a twenty or thirty year period, and that
we needed to remember that people who now might seem clearly to be in
our own or the opposing camp might align themselves differently later
on. The people involved, and their memories of you and how you conduct
yourself, tend to last longer than any of the particular issues we argue
about on any given day.
