The Color of Liberals

Laurence Tribe, liberal Harvard professor and author of the standard liberal Con law text, American Constitutional Law, abandoned his half-completed third edition:

Tribe has concluded that the fissures on the current Court are too deep and too visible-and its future direction too uncertain-to make an effort at Grand Unified Theory worthwhile or plausible. "There are always subterranean disagreements and differences of philosophy," he said in a phone interview. "But now on the Supreme Court, the disagreements are so fundamental and persistent. How much, if at all, should we look abroad when interpreting the Constitution? To what extent is the wall between church and state a misguided enterprise? The way questions like these get resolved will make so much difference in terms of the shape of the future, and it just seems more intelligent to wait for a while."

So what's next for the famous leftist? According to the American Lawyer:

Tribe has other things he'd like to do. . . in particular, a coloring book for grown-ups, with diagrams if not pictures to color.

Before he became a law professor, Tribe was on his way to earning a doctorate in mathematics, and he loves using geometric structures to chart and connect constitutional theories for his Harvard students. The coloring book, designed for lawyers and law students, is about taking that impulse as far as it can go. And when you think about it, the idea isn't so different from a treatise-it's all about linking up different doctrine and decisions, about making sense of the whole by putting together the parts. Plus it sounds like a lot more fun. Maybe the judges of the future will be able to turn to Tribe as their guide to the constitutional developments of the last 15 years. They'll just have to import color-by-number diagrams into their citations.

Though explaining law via Venn diagrams has some "appeal," I thought American Constitutional Law already was about as useful as a coloring book.

(via reader Doug J.)