Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe ’66, Harvard Law Professor of Practice Nancy Gertner and two Harvard Law School alumni were honored by the American Bar Association during the association’s annual meeting in Boston in August.
Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, received the 2014 YLD Fellows Award from the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division at the 2014 YLD Fellows Gala in recognition of his distinguished service to the public or the profession.
Gertner, a former federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, received the ABA Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award. The award, which recognizes and celebrates the accomplishments of women lawyers who have excelled in their field and inspired other women lawyers, is presented to five recipients each year.
Two alumni, Edward M. Ginsburg ’58 and Alan Howard ’87, received the ABA Pro Bono Publico Award, which honors those who have enhanced the human dignity of others by improving or delivering volunteer legal services to the poor.
Ginsburg, who served as an associate justice of the Massachusetts Probate and Family Court for nearly 25 years, was honored for his work with Senior Partners for Justice, a pro bono program he founded at the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association in 2002.
Howard, a partner in Crowell & Moring who does extensive pro bono work, represented one of the defendants in the nationally prominent “Jena 6” proceedings in Louisiana, a case of national prominence for its civil rights implications.
Read more on the 2014 ABA honorees.
Tribe has taught at Harvard Law School since 1968. The title “University Professor” is Harvard’s highest academic honor, awarded to just a handful of professors at any given time and to fewer than 75 professors in all of Harvard University’s history. Tribe entered Harvard at 16 and graduated summa cum laude in 1962 and magna cum laude in law in 1966. He received tenure at age 30 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at 38 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2010. He helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic and the Marshall Islands. Tribe has prevailed in three-fifths of the many appellate cases he has argued (including 35 in the U.S. Supreme Court). He was appointed in 2010 by President Obama and Attorney General Holder to serve as the first senior counselor for access to justice. His most recent book, “Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution” was published in June.
Gertner joined the Harvard Law School faculty as a professor of practice in 2011. In 1994, President Clinton appointed Gertner to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, where she served until September 2011. Gertner was one of very few women trial lawyers in the early 1970s, and built a career as a self-described “revolutionary” and “radical lawyer” fighting for fair sentencing and against discrimination. She was the second woman to have received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the American Bar Association, Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, in 2008. Gertner has served as a panelist, lecturer, and keynote speaker throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia on topics of civil rights, civil liberties, employment, criminal justice and procedural issues. Her autobiography, “In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate,” was published in April 2011.