Replies

On February 6th, 1990, Obama became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.

He manages to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review without ever publishing a SINGLE piece of signed, written work — not one!

Update: Politico claims that an unsigned — and previously unattributed — 1990 article was produced by Obama and offers a glimpse at his views on abortion policy and the law during his student days, and provides a rare addition to his body of work.

The six-page summary, tucked into the third volume of the year’s Harvard Law Review, considers the charged, if peripheral, question of whether fetuses should be able to file lawsuits against their mothers. Obama’s answer: No.

I sent Politico an email asking how they knew the document was produced by Obama, since it is “unsigned — and previously unattributed.” They never responded.

Obama’s timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency, the Harvard Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha.

Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty.

This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.

Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first African American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.

“Obama cast himself as an eager listener,” the New York Times reported, “sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.”

In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all day affair, Obama’s fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR’s small conservative faction threw him its support.

Obama was elected after a meeting of the review’s 80 editors that convened Sunday and lasted until early this morning, a participant said.

Until the 1970’s the editors were picked on the basis of grades, and the president of the Law Review was the student with the highest academic rank. Among these were Elliot L. Richardson, the former Attorney General, and Irwin Griswold, a dean of the Harvard Law School and Solicitor General under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, “A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time. “After his appointment, the NY Times carried a story in February 1990, which included a few quotes from Obama:

“The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” Mr. Obama said today in an interview. “It’s encouraging.” “But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,” he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment...

On his goals in his new post, Mr. Obama said: “I personally am interested in pushing a strong minority perspective. I’m fairly opinionated about this. But as president of the law review, I have a limited role as only first among equals.” Therefore, Mr. Obama said, he would concentrate on making the review a “forum for debate,” bringing in new writers and pushing for livelier, more accessible writing.

Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited, unsigned note.

In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any limits on abortion, citing the government’s interest in “preventing increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and despair.” Well, the new system, disputed when it began, was meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review.

And, it worked!

In other words, Obama was the first affirmative action President of the Harvard Law Revue.

http://www.theobamafile.com/ObamaEducation.htm