Tribe, Laurence H(enry) (1941– )

US legal scholar of Russian-Jewish origin. He is considered a brilliant Supreme Court litigator and legal scholar. In addition to his teaching career at Harvard (1969), he served as a consultant to several government committees including the US Senate Committee on Public Works (1970–72). In 1978 he helped write a new constitution for the Marshall Islands. Perhaps he is best known for his frequent Congressional testimony, particularly in regard to Supreme Court nominees (he influenced the failure of Robert H Bork's nomination in 1987).

Tribe was born in Shanghai, China, to Russian-Jewish parents. His father was a naturalized American and the family moved to San Francisco when Tribe was five years old.

He warned against ‘presidential court-packing’ in his book, God Save This Honorable Court (1985). His expertise was in legal, constitutional, and jurisprudential theory; the role of law in shaping technological development; and the uses and abuses of mathematical methods in policy and systems analysis. His major publications are Legal Process and Technological Change (1980), and American Constitutional Law (1978).