Legal Ramblings
[ Tuesday, February 26, 2002 (3:20 PM) ] ( link )
HLS dinner—Tribe and Kripke: I attended a dinner run by the Harvard Law School admissions board yesterday. It was a nice "sell" dinner, where all the admitted Harvard College students were given a chance to have a nice meal with some faculty members. The dinner was held in a beautiful reading room on the top floor of Langdell.
A lot of people that I knew were there, including most of the people from Marglin's junior tutorial last year: Vicki, Lauren, Nate, Paven, me. Steve was there too, as well as Allon and some others. I had the fortune of sitting at the same table as Laurence Tribe, who is a major constitutional scholar and a fascinating person. He talked a great deal about his work drafting other countries' constitutions and representing people before the Supreme Court. (Also interesting: Professor Tribe and I were the only men in a table otherwise occupied by females, all of them significantly better looking than the two of us.)
But the most interesting part of the conversation was when I asked Professor Tribe how he got into teaching law. He then said that he at first studied math as an undergrad, and in fact was getting a PhD in mathematics (which he still finds the most beautiful subject) when he decided to go to law school. What prompted his decision was that he couldn't talk about math with his then-girlfriend (now his wife), and he wanted to do something more real and less abstract. Tribe was a mathematician! How cool is that.
And get this: he then asked me if I did a lot of math, and I gushed about math for a little bit. But I said I didn't pursue it here because everybody here was so much better. And he said that he understood. When he graduated (undergrad or grad, I forgot) he was one of two students that year with a summa. But the other guy was brilliant: he had published papers either in high school or in college that Tribe was studying in graduate school, and this other guy was widely acknowledged as a one-of-a-kind genius. Then Tribe sips his drink and looks around and says, "I don't know if any of you know him: Saul Kripke?"
LAURENCE TRIBE KNEW SAUL KRIPKE!!!!!! One of them ended up the leading constitutional scholar in this country; the other one ended up one of the most significant philosophers (and Wittgensteinians) of this generation. Amazing.
Anyway, the meal at the dinner was all right; we were talking too much to finish it, but we did get a chance to finish the dessert, which was this heavenly chocolate souffle (I think). But, aside from Professor Tribe, the best part of the meal was how well they presented Harvard Law School. Professor after professor gushed about the opportunities students had there, about the prestige of attending HLS, and so on. They even addressed head-on the comparison between Harvard and Yale; Tribe piped up to say that he didn't think people really taught law at Yale Law School! Steve said afterward that this was definitely the case: at least in his father's experience, law firms and other legal professionals seem to believe that HLS graduates definitely know more law than Yale Law School students, although I imagine that after a few years the differences are fairly negligible.
At any rate, I haven't even made it into Yale yet—maybe the rejection letter is sitting in my mailbox as I write!—so my decision could be very easy. But it was good to feel after the dinner that HLS would be a very, very good choice indeed.
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