Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression
Oct. 20, 2008 by ngarrett
Featuring Laurence Tribe
The Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard University
Life Unedited: Wednesday, October 22, 8:00 p.m., Memorial Chapel
The visible text of the First Amendment protects such specific freedoms as “speech,” “press,” “assembly,” and “religion.” Its invisible but no less fundamental subtext and structure, however, protect much more. In this lecture, Laurence Tribe will argue that, at its core, the First Amendment shields each of us from government efforts to rewrite – to revise, reshape, or edit – the stories we tell ourselves and one another through the ways we decide to script our lives and the narratives we define by our intimate personal choices involving birth, education, occupation, sex, and death.
Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, has taught there since 1968 and was voted best professor by the class of 2000. “University Professor” is Harvard’s highest title, awarded to only 49 professors in the 20th century and eight in the 21st and now held by just 19 of the 1,432 tenured professors on Harvard’s nine faculties. Born in China of Russian Jewish parents, Tribe entered Harvard at 16; graduated summa cum laude in mathematics (1962) and magna cum laude in law (1966); clerked for the California and U.S. Supreme Courts (1966-68); was voted a tenured profes-sorship at 29; helped write constitutions for South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the Marshall Islands; has prevailed in three-fifths of the many appellate cases, most of them pro bono, that he has argued (including 34 in the U.S. Supreme Court); and has written 115 books and articles, including American Constitutional Law, cited more often than any other legal text since 1950.
The Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression, endowed by a gift from Leonard S. Halpert, Esq., Class of 1944, is named in honor of the late U. S. Supreme Court Justice.
