He graduated? Did anyone witness that? Really the only written material that ties 0bama to being the editor of the Harvard Law Review are his parking tickets in the Cambridge/Somerville area and the apartment he lived in at the time in Somerville.
I had one class with him. He was in the year ahead of me. Carol Platt, who was an editor at HLR and now blogs for Town Square has written that he was a chief who mostly worked at home—a euphemism for leaving the hard work to others, like her.
He was around. He was a big man even then, someone who the faculty was grooming for big things.
I remember him speaking at rally lionizing Derek Bell for his decision to take an extended Sabbatical at Columbia or NYU in order to protest HLS’s failure to hire “a woman of color.” That was one of the big issues back then. (Lani Gunier was hired shortly thereafter.) He introduced Bell to the crowd saying in Jacksonesque cadences: “He made his name by standing up when he was told to sit down, and sitting down when he was told to stand up.” The predominantly black crowd really whooped it up. He had them.
BlogPimp Alert: I blogged about this era (1991) on 8/9/11 after WSJ’s Brett Stephens wrote “Is Obama Smart?”. With apologies: http://nomansays.blogspot.com/2011/08/is-obama-smart.html.