THE TRAITOR TRIBE?

[Geee]

Powerline:

THE TRAITOR TRIBE?

 

Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, you may recall, was one of the leaders of the mob that crushed Robert Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court nomination, and is one of the leading fixtures of the Left in legal academia. And one of the more remarkable documents you’ll ever read that reveals the protean constitutionalism of the Left is Tribe’s 1989 Harvard Law Review article entitled “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics.”

For all of its fancy footwork, the article reduces to a simple proposition: because Einstein’s theory of relativity proved that gravity curves space, we should adopt a wholly relativistic attitude in jurisprudence, because of the shifting “gravity” of contemporary social needs. It’s just an update of Brandeis/Holmes-style “felt necessities of the time” argument, adapted for the age of Star Trek I suppose. I sometimes assign this article to students, who find it unconvincing, if not bizarre. In the acknowledgements, however, Tribe thanks one of his research assistants: Barack Obama.

 

Which makes all the more remarkable that Tribe is now opposing the Obama Administration’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions with the Clean Air Act and through the EPA. This has raised the eyebrows, and the ire, of all the usual suspects, starting with the New York Times over the weekend:

 

Laurence Tribe Fights Climate Case Against Star Pupil From Harvard, President Obama

[M]any in the Obama administration and at Harvard are bewildered and angry that Mr. Tribe, who argued on behalf of Al Gore in the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, has emerged as the leading legal opponent of Mr. Obama’s ambitious efforts to fight global warming.