Tribe Resigns Editorship Of Faculty Law Journal

The editor and creator of a new Law School faculty journal resigned last month from his editoral post before the first issue of the review had been published.

Citing fears that the editorship would be too great a drain on his scholarly research, Laurence S. Tribe '62, Tyler professor of constitutional law, said he would no longer edit the journal which he had proposed as an alternative to the current student-edited Harvard Law Review.

"Despite this setback, I still strongly favor the project," Law School Dean James Vorenberg '49 wrote to all faculty members in a memorandum announcing Tribe's resignation.

Officials at the Law School said that the journal will be produced despite Tribe's resignation. But they added that it will take longer to publish the first issue.

"The project will get off the ground still," said Phillip Heymann, associate dean of the Law School. He added that Tribe was an excellent person to run the magazine but there were other people who could do a very good job.

Vorenberg said in the memo that he now wants to provide further discussion of the plans for the faculty law review and give the project more time.

Tribe refused to comment on his resignation. Vorenberg is on vacation and could not be reached for comment.

Tribe originally said that the journal would publish articles which student editors often overlook. When he accepted the editorship in December, Tribe said that these pieces fall "somewhere in between the elaborate scholarly production and the breezy think-piece."

In proposing the journal, Tribe criticized the student editors of the prestigious Harvard Law Review saying "that even the best student editors are sometimes ill-equipped [to judge articles] by background and temperament."

But several students at the school questioned how effectiveley an ideologically divided faculty could publish a journal. In the memorandum Vorenberg wrote that the delay will allow more students to participate in the discussion process about the new journal in order to "take account of the concerns expressed by students affiliated with our existing journals."

"We will take a look again at exactly what the journal should be," Heymann said. "There are questions on to what extent it should be a popular journal and to what extent it should be a scholarly journal."