Adrastos, Comedy, Diary, Law/Justice, Political Crack, Television, Twitter

Tweet Of The Day: Larry Tribe Edition

One of the pleasures of Twitter is following people one admires. One is apparently not the loneliest number. I guess Harry Nilsson was wrong. Enough of this one-upsmanship. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe is one of the ones I refer to. Below is one of the Tribal tweets about the Sessions Session:

I called it preemptive executive privilege in my instant analysis post but I yield to the distinguished gentleman from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  He literally wrote the book on American Constitutional Law. It’s one of the few readable legal treatises I’ve ever picked up; most of them make good door stops when not in use. That explains why Tribe is good at the whole 140 character thing.

In addition to one punning, the reason for this post is that I have a Tribe-related law school war story to tell. I have omitted the name of the Professor because I can. He was my “con law” prof so I’ll call him Con Law. Pull up a chair, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and enjoy.

Con Law was a small man who was originally from New York and had the accent to prove it. My contemporaneous impression of him sounded like Jon Lovitz’s SNL character Tommy Flanagan (not to be confused with the actor who played bad ass biker Tig on Sons of Anarchy.) Unlike the pathological liar dude, Con Law was a good man and an excellent professor as well. He was, however, prone to bragging about the well-known people who knew and loved him. In short, Con Law was a name dropper. I know what you’re thinking: so I am. That’s true but it’s beside the point. I’m not sure what the point is but there’s bound to be one somewhere.

One of the names Con Law dropped was Laurence Tribe. He never called him by either his full name or title and surname, he was always Larry Tribe. Con Law turned both names into a multi-syllabic pronunciation extravaganza. There would come a point in most classes that I’d nudge a friend and whisper, “here IT comes.” The IT in question was a Larry Tribe name drop; usually about how they’d discussed an issue and agreed on it. It was Con Law and Larry Tribe against the world, y’all.

Con Law’s relentless braggadocio was the reason I used the voice of the pathological liar character in my impression. Not because Con Law was lying but because of his OTT boasting. It was actually charming in a cocky short man kind of way. Con Law may have been short but he ran with the big boys including Larry Tribe.

To this day when I see Professor Tribe on teevee or read his tweets, I think of Con Law and hear his voice in my head saying Larrrr-eeee Tryyyyyy-buh. Yeah, that’s the ticket.