Legal News

Mr. Tribe Heads to Washington

By Ashby Jones

It’s hard not to love the opening anecdote in Charlie Savage’s article in Thursday’s NYT:

Savage reports that in a “hardscrabble” D.C. neighborhood, a man at a legal clinic stopped in to ask a question about his mother’s will. His case wound up in the lap of a Justice Department lawyer, “one of about 20 volunteers that day.”

When the man asked if the volunteer was a lawyer, Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor and constitutional-law guru (or dare we say, “ninja“?) “assured the man that he was,” and then began researching.

Tribe’s appearance at the walk-in desk was no fluke, reports the NYT. Tribe is now the “senior counselor for access to justice.” Writes Savage:

Mr. Tribe has been asked to suggest ways to improve legal services for the poor, find alternatives to court-intensive litigation and strengthen the fairness and independence of domestic courts. But Mr. Tribe has a small staff, a limited budget, little concrete authority and a portfolio far less sweeping than the one he told friends he had hoped to take on in Washington.

He is also, as the Times reports, “largely invisible.” The DOJ is not allowing him to give interviews, “apparently in part because of nervousness in the administration that his unabashedly liberal views might draw criticism . . . .”

Sorta strange, eh?

Absolutely, though it’s perhaps a bit less surprising when one remembers that Tribe threw his weight behind Obama early on. “And, friends say, events in Mr. Tribe's personal life - including a brain tumor and a divorce - heightened his desire to leave Cambridge for a while and to try something new: public service,” reports the Times.

On the larger question of whether Tribe is proving particularly helpful, the story points to comments made by Attorney General Eric Holder, who has said he is grateful for Tribe's presence:

When Mr. Holder gave a recent speech before a group that urges lawyers to do pro bono work, he took Mr. Tribe along and pointed him out, lauding his initiative as a landmark expansion of the department's efforts to improve access to legal services.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 08, 2010 (boomark / email).