What is going on with Laurence Tribe, professor at Harvard Law School, mentor to Barack Obama, and one of the most venerated legal scholars in the country? Over the past month, he has come under widespread and sometimes vicious attack. He has been called a sellout and a traitor whose arguments are “baseless” and “far-fetched” by professors at New York University, Harvard, and Georgetown. Most of the specific criticism arises from his representation of Peabody Energy, a coal company, in its effort to squash the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of carbon emissions. Of course, it is natural, and part of the job of an academic, to have people disagree with you. But there is a more serious question here: Is Tribe being unfairly indicted for a deviation from liberal orthodoxy, or has he taken steps that justifiably undermine his credibility as a scholar?

Tribe has long been among the nation’s most highly regarded law professors. He is a gifted writer and thinker; his treatise "American Constitutional Law" gained deservedly canonical status in the nineteen-eighties. Over that decade, Tribe also built a strong reputation as a practitioner of constitutional law by arguing a series of high-profile Supreme Court cases, the best known of which was probably the gay-rights case Bowers v. Hardwick. This left him in a unique position. “Never before in American history has an individual simultaneously achieved Tribe’s preeminence both as a practitioner and as a scholar of constitutional law,” William Powell wrote in 1986.

Tribe’s dual role of scholar and practitioner is uncommon, but not unheard of, in legal academia. In some countries, legal academics are thought of as neutral expositors of the law and therefore barred from legal practice. But that is certainly not the case in the United States, where many scholars take work as paid consultants, expert witnesses, or even active counsel. This “scholar-warrior” model has historical pedigree and advantages of its own. Legal scholars with at least some connection to practice tend to have a deeper, more impressive feel for their area of expertise. Professors are always in danger of becoming too disconnected from reality—of spending their time throwing pseudo-light onto non-problems, as Kingsley Amis once put it.

But it would also be foolish to ignore the inherent tension in searching for truth while also working for paying clients. The scholar-warrior may lapse into a far more contemptible figure: the scholar for hire, who sells his name and his title for cash. A subtler danger comes from the well-known and nearly unavoidable tendency lawyers have of identifying with their clients. As the law professor Rebecca Eisenberg wrote in 1993, “The role of advocate calls for constructing persuasive arguments that will generate favorable outcomes for clients. This is very different from the function [academics] perform as scholars.” In this manner, working for a client, over the long term, can prove corrupting, not just because of the money but because of natural human loyalty. “If consulting activities distort the views that law faculty espouse as scholars, then academic freedom is failing to perform its essential function,” Eisenberg said.

The signs of this more subtle distortion are obvious once you know what you are looking for. A progressive scholar who believes that large corporations endanger democracy begins to make inexplicable exceptions for Microsoft or Google. Another, who made his name as a conservative libertarian, supports regulation that also happens to be useful to A.T. & T. Alternately, a scholar may become entrenched in his or her views to the point of absurdity. Nothing can change his mind, for going soft might endanger his inflated income and anger his friends. If this kind of thing goes too far, academia can become thoroughly corrupted.

The seeds of the present controversy can be found in the late nineteen-eighties, when Tribe enlarged both the scope and the intensity of his litigation practice. He began to operate what was, essentially, a small law firm, located in a building next to his Cambridge home that happened to be a well-known Philip Johnson house. His practice was staffed by law students, working as if they were associates, and recent graduates, some of whom actually lived in the office. Sometimes, Tribe worked alone; other times, he worked in partnership with corporate law firms.

Most universities put some limit on the amount of time that faculty may spend on “outside” activities. Harvard’s conflict-of-interest policies are vaguer than most, but they roughly suggest that outside activities remain secondary to serving the university’s academic mission. While Tribe surely spent much time and effort litigating, few would deny that Tribe continued to perform his academic job very well. Indeed, he has been widely praised for his teaching, and beloved particularly by his research assistants, many of whom have gone on to important careers in practice, academia, and politics.

Over the years, Tribe has represented many clients for free, such as in the gay-rights movement or when he lent his talents to the State of Massachusetts in its suit against the tobacco industry. It may come as a surprise for those who regard Tribe as a progressive hero to learn that he also began to devote much of his time and effort to working for large corporate clients. In particular, Tribe developed a lucrative practice often premised on invoking his clients’ constitutional rights as “corporate persons” to try and avoid federal and state regulations.

Tribe has had far too many clients to describe fully, but it is possible to give some examples. He helped General Electric argue that being ordered to clean up hazardous waste sites on the Hudson River was a violation of its constitutional rights. He aided Pacific Gas and Electric in complex bankruptcy proceedings, and defended Nike in a suit that claimed the company was lying about its sweatshop practices. Tribe also helped American Trucking Associations and the Petroleum Marketers Association of America fight common-law claims related to global warming. More recently, he assisted a hedge fund named Bulldog Investors in trying to block the enforcement of certain securities laws; his argument was based, in part, on the idea that such laws violated the fund’s First Amendment rights. In the nineteen-nineties, he worked on multiple cases helping the Bell companies try to avoid or nullify telecommunications regulation, and in the 2009 he helped Time Warner Cable fight net-neutrality rules, based on a theory of corporate First Amendment rights. In short, Tribe’s representation of Peabody Energy is nothing new. It is rather representative of his work over the past two decades.

How you feel about this work probably depends on how you feel about the use of the Constitution as an anti-regulatory tool and the idea of corporations as constitutional “persons.” Tribe has taken a strong view of individual rights; his view of corporate rights is similar, and in this capacity he has at times advanced constitutional arguments that might invalidate great parts of the administrative state, in a manner recalling the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. In that sense, the current condemnation of Tribe can be seen as part of a larger progressive backlash against the use of the Bill of Rights to serve corporate interests.