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Obama certainly wasn't on course to graduate Magna after his first year because he didn't make the Review on grades.

I know that HLR has AA appointments, but I've not seen it specified how Obama made law review, whether it be by grades, AA, or writing competition.

Do you have a source for how Obama made Law Review?

If Obama didn't have the first year grades to make Law Review, then even if he had all A's for the next two years, it wouldn't be sufficient to make the top 5% of the class.

For example, first year GPA 3.5, years two and three 4.0, final GPA: 3.83. That isn't going to be better than 19 of 20 students.

I think Obama was awarded Magna on the basis of his AA HLR, then his election to President of the HLR. For the HLS faculty, it would be an glaring inconvenient truth for the President of the HLR to graduate without any honors, so honors he was going to have. As long as they were conjuring honors out of nothing, they might as well give him the Magna otherwise commensurate with being President of the HLR.

I find this scenario a lot more plausible than the Obama we know to have the transcendent brilliance and expend the epic effort it would have required to graduate Magna from HLS.

I have no source other than contemporaneous hearsay. If memory serves, Obama’s success in the writing competition was a subject of gossip in the HLS community in 1989. Alumnae of the Review talked about it in hushed tones because people thought he got a slot on the Review only because certain left wing professors sponsored him. Everyone wondered why he was so favored. His election as President of the Editorial Board the next year was even more discussed.

I graduated in ‘87 just before Obama started and I went into law teaching so I stayed better plugged into the grapevine than most grads do and I heard the rumors. There has always been a peculiar disconnect between Obama’s apparent ability and his achievements; people have been talking about it for 20 years. But those who want to believe will believe.