Event preview: Laurence Tribe on the Roberts Court
Leading constitutional lawyer and scholar Laurence Tribe will join the National Constitution Center to discuss what he calls a “deeper understanding of the substance of the [Supreme] Court’s work and how it is transforming our nation.”
Tribe, who taught Chief Justice John Roberts at Harvard Law School, will draw primarily from his new book, Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution.
You can watch a live stream of the event tonight beginning at 6:30 p.m. EDT.
“[M]ost of the purported ‘certainties’ about the Roberts Court that currently stalk the land are misleading,” Tribe wrote in a recent series for the Volokh Conspiracy, a popular legal blog. “The justices are too diverse, the Constitution too capacious, and the Court’s role too complex to yield to such reductionism.”
“The story of the Roberts Court is a lot more interesting and more fraught with surprise, treachery and internal disagreement than such too-tidy plot lines suggest,” he added.
In his conversation with the Constitution Center’s Jeffrey Rosen, Tribe will bring to bear an illustrious career of nearly fifty years in the law.
His record includes a 60 percent success rate in appellate courts—including the Supreme Court—and more than 100 books and articles, including American Constitutional Law, cited more than any other legal text since 1950.
“We sought neither to praise the Roberts Court nor to bury it, but rather to paint a more lifelike picture of that profoundly important institution,” wrote Tribe of himself and co-author Joshua Matz.
“And we soon discovered that in every area of law—free speech, campaign finance, gay rights, privacy, presidential power, and more—there remained amazing tales to be told, stories of nine people with remarkable power disagreeing in good faith over the most important issues of our time.”
This event is sold out. Please join us online for a live stream beginning at 6:30 p.m. EDT. You can also read the prologue from Uncertain Justice.
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