It was only a year ago that we found ourselves -- quite unexpectedly -- agreeing with Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe.  Back then, he was announcing that he had given up on revising and republishing his influential treatise, American Constitutional Law, because he had come "to the sobering realization that no treatise ... can be true to this moment in our constitutional history."

Professor Tribe observed, "in area after area, we find ourselves at a fork in the road-- a point at which it's fair to say things could go in any of several directions ... because conflict over basic constitutional premises is today at a fever pitch."  And, he lamented that, as a result, there was "no vision capacious and convincing enough to propound as an organizing principle" for the "conflicts, innovations, and complexities" handed down by the Supreme Court.

We couldn't have agreed with him more.  (See "Agreeing With Professor Tribe...") But that was then. Little did we know that was only the first of his pair of shoes to drop.

Now it appears that Professor Tribe believes the jurisprudential consequence of the constitutional confusion created and compounded by the Supreme Court is that anything goes when it comes to judicial decision-making.  After all, that's the only conclusion we can draw from Professor Tribe's comments in the aftermath of a federal district judge's decision to strike down the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program.

Last Friday, Boston Globe legal affairs reporter Charlie Savage quoted an e-mail message from Professor Tribe, in which the much-touted constitutional expert wrote that the judge had done a "splendid job" of demonstrating that the "administration acted in an inexcusably lawless manner."

From a political perspective, those comments should have surprised no one.  After all, Professor Tribe has been no friend to President George W. Bush or his expansive interpretation of presidential power during the War on Terror.  But, from a legal perspective, the comments were nothing short of shocking.

Just a day after the decision, Professor Tribe found himself all but alone within the legal academy praising the judge's decision.  The legal blogosphere was picking the judge's opinion apart piece by piece, and it wasn't taking too much effort.  Indeed, law professors both right and left were in rare agreement that the decision was filled with more rhetoric and politics than analysis and law.

The verdict that the judge's opinion was both sloppy and ill-conceived was so overwhelming that New York Times legal affairs reporter Adam Liptak even published a front page story on Saturday about the "almost universal" criticism.  "Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge's conclusion ... were distancing themselves from the decision's reasoning," he wrote as the lead.  Liptak went on to explain that the experts "said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government's major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions."

First-person criticism by members of the legal academy was just as blunt and direct.  Commenting on the judge's Fourth Amendment analysis, George Washington Law Professor Orin Kerr wrote on a web log: "It's just a few pages of general ruminations ... much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect."  And that was tame compared to the opening sentence of a New York Times op-ed column penned by Ann Althouse, a University of Wisconsin law professor, who observed, "to end her opinion ... Judge Anna Diggs Taylor quoted Earl Warren (referring to him as 'Justice Warren, not "Chief Justice Warren, as if she wanted to spotlight her carelessness)..."

Nevertheless, Professor Tribe had a response.  In open comments sent over the weekend to Liptak of the New York Times and posted on a legal web log, Professor Tribe criticized both the legal academy and the press for taking the judge to task, when "[i]t's those with constitutional blood on their hands who deserve to be chastised most insistently in the public press."  In fact, Professor Tribe went so far as to call it "an indulgence to spend so much time complaining ... that the judge who called foul used some ill-chosen rhetoric, and that she stuttered and sputtered a bit more than necessary" when doing so came "at the expense of distracting the general public from the far more important conclusion that the nation's chief executive has been guilty of a shamelessly unlawful power grab."  In other words -- and in far fewer words -- Professor Tribe believes that if the judge got it right, the rest of us really shouldn't care why.

Of course, here is where our relationship with Professor Tribe has once again returned to normal -- disagreement.  As Professor Althouse so clearly explained in her op-ed: "If the words of the written opinion reveal that the judge did not follow the discipline of the judicial process, what sense does it make to take the judge's word about what the law means over the word of the president?  If the judge's own writing does not support a belief that the rule of law has substance and depth, that law is something apart from political will, the significance of saying the president has gone beyond the limits of law evaporates."

We wholeheartedly agree with that.