Sloppiness like this disturbs me. Obama was not the editor of the Law Review. He was its president which is decidedly of less importance.
ML/NJ
You are correct that the real work at the Harvard Law Review is done by the student editors on the Editorial Board. But there are about 90 student “editors” and there is only one President of Volume who becomes an “editor-in-chief”. So the most prestigious position is President of Volume.
The following excerpt is from an article about the current President of Volume, Mitchell Reich:
“As president, Reich will play the role of the editor-in-chief—overseeing the publication of both in-house and scholarly articles in the review—and of managing the staff and external relations. He says that, as president, he intends to continue the expansion of the web edition of the law review, transforming the web version into a valuable tool for scholars and an online mecca for scholarly discourse and debate. Reich also says he wants to be more conscientious about the length of legal articles—keeping articles at around 25,000 and below 30,000 words. But above all, Reich says he wanted to continue to produce a first-rate publication.
“My predecessor and the class before is a tough act to follow,” Reich says, going on to explain that he hoped to keep the tradition of excellence alive in the eight issues he would oversee as president.”
Published in the Harvard Crimson newspaper on February 8, 2011.
There are plenty of people around who worked with Obama on the Law Review. As President of the Law Review, he had absolutely nothing to do with editorial content, or editorial anything. His role was strictly administrative and he is reported to have done it very badly; he was dinged by his colleagues as ceremonial and decorative rather than functional. To top it off, unless there was a social function involved, he was very rarely even seen by the other people who ran the operation, which BTW, has a paid professional staff in addition to the student contributors.
This pattern continues in his style of working the White House. That is, no work. No details. He is an atrocious writer, being much more skilled at reading the work of others as a presentation.