A Prophet's Unlikely Defender

By MichaelS. Serrill

Harvard's Professor Tribe courts both issues and publicity

It is hard to imagine a more unpopular cause than defending the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Attorneys for the Korean evangelist carried out a survey in 1982 and found that more than 75% of those questioned reacted negatively to Moon's name. He is widely thought of as a brainwasher and exploiter of American young people. Given this prejudice, officials of the Unification Church knew that they would need a lawyer with impeccable credentials to represent the self-proclaimed "Prophet of God" in an appeal of his 1982 conviction for filing false federal income tax returns. The advocate they eventually landed was Laurence H. Tribe, 42, a Harvard professor of constitutional law with a national reputation as a defender of civil rights and feminist causes.

Next week Tribe will file a petition before the U.S. Supreme Court asking for a review of the Moon case. At first glance it might seem curious that a lawyer who sees himself as a champion of the poor should be coming to the defense of the powerful evangelist, who will have to serve 18 months in prison unless his conviction is overturned. Tribe has agreed to take the Moon case because he sees a basic constitutional issue at stake. The religious leader, he argues, was unfairly prosecuted for financial practices that are common among some larger, established churches; moreover, says Tribe, the prosecution is an unwarranted intrusion by the Government and a jury into church affairs. "It is exactly the people who are hated who ought to have the protection of the courts against mass hysteria," he says. "The issue in this case is not religion alone but rather how to protect minorities against oppression."

That comment typifies the rigorous intellectual style of Tribe, who was appointed to the Harvard Law School faculty at the ripe young age of 26. His 1978 treatise American Constitutional Law has become a primary reference work for scholars, lawyers and judges across the country and has been cited in more than 400 court cases. Jesse Choper, dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, places Tribe at "the very top of his field" as one of the law's most brilliant scholars. In recent years. Tribe has also become a fearsome presence in the courtroom, where he generally takes the liberal side of legal and social issues. "I have enormous respect for his ability, his intelligence and his analytical skills," says U.S. Solicitor General Rex Lee, who represents the Government in cases before the Supreme Court. The conservative Lee says that he and Tribe disagree on nine out often issues, but adds, "I don't know that I have ever had a more skillful opponent."

Tribe's batting average is remarkable. Since 1980, he has taken seven cases to the Supreme Court and has won five. Those winning presentations have involved such disparate issues as California's right to stop the construction of new nuclear power plants within the state and the right of a Cambridge, Mass., restaurant to have a liquor license. In the latter case, he persuaded the court to strike down a state law that gave churches the right to block the issuance of liquor licenses to nearby businesses.

The law professor has received considerable press coverage in Massachusetts for his efforts to collect $332,000 from the state for his work in the liquor-license case, an amount the Massachusetts attorney general declared unreasonable. The dispute has continued even though the professor reduced the requested fee to $150,000, which he says covers the work of three lawyers over six years. Tribe has never been shy about publicity: some Washington reporters say that until recently he often called them to announce his latest court victories. "He may tend to be a little cocky," says fellow Constitutional Scholar Yale Kamisar of the University of Michigan. "But it's just a matter of knowing what he can do."

Born in Shanghai, China, Tribe is the son of Polish Jews who fled both Soviet and Nazi persecution. The family emigrated to San Francisco when he was five. A gifted child, he completed high school at 16 and majored in mathematics at Harvard College. After graduating summa cum laude, he began a Ph.D. program in math, specializing in the rarefied subject of algebraic topology. Midway through the doctoral program, he decided that mathematics would be too "lonely" a pursuit and enrolled in Harvard Law School. He finished magna cum laude in 1966, and a year later was selected as law clerk for now retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

Tribe's background in mathematics has helped make him an expert on some highly technical legal subjects. He has written a book on the interaction between technology and the law, and is at work on a second on the same subject. He is also updating American Constitutional Law.

As a recognition of this expertise, the Marshall Islands in 1978 invited Tribe to help write the Pacific island chain's constitution.

Teaching is Tribe's first love, and his exuberant style has made him a popular lecturer in constitutional law. Says one former student: "His mind works so quickly, and comes up with such different ideas, that the course is really impressive and challenging." Off campus, the professor is an accomplished painter and an admirer of surrealist art. He lives with his wife and two children in a late 19th century Cambridge house, decorated with modern Italian art deco-style furniture. Tribe supports the good life with his $70,000 Harvard salary plus substantial earnings from his private law practice. His fees for cases vary, but can go as high as "hundreds" of dollars an hour. He will not say what he is charging for his work on the Moon case.

The lawyer has long been an activist in a variety of liberal causes and occasionally will take on civil rights and civil liberties cases and charge no fee. He is a critic of the Reagan Administration's cutbacks in social welfare programs and has expressed deep dismay about the decisions of the Burger Supreme Court, which he attacks for its "refusal to recognize certain rights of poor people," including the right of women to have federally funded abortions. He has no illusions about the role lawyers play in American society: "Too many lawyers use their poorer and less powerful clients, and let themselves get used by their richer and more powerful clients." But he sees a more noble mission for the legal profession: "Ideally, law should be at the cutting edge. The mission of legal education and legal practice needs to be harnessed more to a vision of law's potential role in society."

--By MichaelS. Serrill. Reported by Joelle Attinger/Boston

With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Boston