FANTASTIC Times article on OBAMA's time as Law Professor

[liberalpragmatist]

Check it out...

> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/politics/30law.html?pagewanted=1&hp

Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart

By JODI KANTOR
Published: July 30, 2008

EXCERPTS:



CHICAGO — The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship. (p. 1)

...

Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status. (p. 1)

<snip>

For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

A favorite theme, said Salil Mehra, now a law professor at Temple University, were the values and cultural touchstones that Americans share. Mr. Obama’s case in point: his wife, Michelle, a black woman, loved “The Brady Bunch” so much that she could identify every episode by its opening shots.

As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.) (p. 2)

The article also links to PDFs of his final exams from his seminar from 1996 through 2003. And a course syllabus from 1994.

Below, a page grab of the aforementioned syllabus:



Obviously a man of incredible intellect. The claim that Obama has no substance has, well, no substance. DO check out his exams - really, pretty cool.

[BlooInBloo]

1. I heart smart people.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

5. Me too.

:loveya:

[Radical Activist]

2. The lacking substance claims were always ridiculous.

It was a cheap shot that appealed to people who wanted to feel superior to the herd.

[depakid]

13. Not everyone who understands legal analysis is impressed

with certain constitutional positions that he's taken- or the apparent rationale behind them.

It would be interesting to hear what some of his colleages and he have discussed on issues like these in private.

TNR had an article that skirted aound that, too:

Con Law: What the University of Chicago right thinks of Obama.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=86dd0277-c6ee-4e3c-83e9-0bb468c5c40d

Not very substantive, but interesting and relevant to the OP.

[Frank Booth]

14. Which "certain constitutional positions" do you mean? Or are you basing this all

on Richard Epstein's jealous rants?

[depakid]

18. We can start with his repudiation of Coker v. Georgia

(limiting the Death Penalty to murder cases).

Or the implications re: advise and consent evident in his criticism of the Alito filibuster.

Or any of a number of implications with respect to FISA.

Or the rationale behind his support the so called Class Action "Fairness" Act, written by and for abusive corporations.

[TexasObserver]

20. The smart ones are.

[depakid]

21. Really?

Hadn't heard that... though I have heard a number of learned folks wonder aloud WTF about certain things.

My own take is simply that having a consistent scheme of jurisprudence isn't always compatible with the ambitions of a politician.

[TexasObserver]

22. Yes, Really.

I'd like to know who has a "consistent scheme of jurisprudence" on the bench. Each judge takes his or her own beliefs, and adopts the line of cases which help them end up where they wish to end up.

There's a case that stands for both sides of just about every legal issue courts consider. You've read the cases. You know how they do. One court rules one way, and another court cites it and distinguishes THEIR case from the prior one, so they can get a different result.

I can argue any side of any civil issue, and find case law to support it. As one of my mentors taught me long ago, first get the court to want to rule your way, then show them the case law stepping stones they can use to get there.

I'm pretty jaded about law after practicing over three decades. The doctrine of stare decisis is a fraud. They rule how those 3 or 9 or 15 judges want to rule, and they cobble together an opinion that a majority will sign. There are more political appellate judges in the federal judiciary than ever, and they don't give a damn about the prior decision, if they want to arrive at a different conclusion. The ruling in the Bush and Gore case in 2000 was a classic example of how phony the entire process is.

It's about having the votes at the Supreme Court, the votes to prevail on political issues. Dress it up, but it's about winning those votes, and it takes FIVE of them. They'll come up with some rationale, and they will come up with some case law basis to support it.

[depakid]

23. Be that as it may

(and we can disagree about the nature of precedent or how to twist the holding holdings and/or points of law around) there are certain cases that stand for much larger principles that aren't so easily sold out.

Coker is one of these (though that the whole deal could have been avoided by broadly applying the 8th Amendment to the Death penalty in Furman in 1972, thereby brining the US into compliance with international treaties and prevailing western law).

You may have heard it said: "bad facts make bad law." What that acknowledges is that most human beings are poorly equipped to deal with abstract principles, because their emotions overrule their reasoning.

Gifted legal scholars and jurists (who are few and far between) not only understand that, but are able to maintain consistency with overriding principles in analyzing statutes and building a common law.

Appeals in particular involve more than specific facts. Thus, the Kennedy case wasn't about putting child rapists to death; it was about allowing states to arbitrarily apply the death penalty to whatever set of circumstances it deems heinous- creating a slippery slope and breaching a bright line.

Unless one wants to see America become more like Iran- and less like every other western nation, there really aren't two sides to that.

[TexasObserver]

25. It's "hard cases make bad law"

That's the saying, but in more recent years, it has been bastardized and mis-characterized as "bad facts make bad law."

I would not use that form of the saying, because in trial work, every side has what we call "bad facts." You have a great witness, but they had two drinks and a Xanax. Your client let their nephew drive their car, and knew he had three accidents last year. Bad facts. Those do not make bad law. They make for every case in the courthouse. You can't find a case without some bad facts.

HARD cases make bad law. That's the case where the letter of the law makes little old lady lose her house to some swindling, no good bastard. That's the case in which judges torture the law to help little old lady win.

You have adopted a philosophy, and I say "adopted," because someone else birthed it, but you took it as your own. That philosophy is that legal thinkers must have a consistent framework around which they fashion their rulings. That's not in dispute. This is not whether they have it, but the extent to which they are tethered irretrievably to it. I say they all bend and break their own rules when they need to get from point A to point B. You fantasize that somewhere there is a judge who simply calls balls and strikes, and doesn't care who that might screw.

If you want to have your point of view, doesn't bother me, but it's not truth, it's simply your vision of truth.

[Pirate Smile]

3. Here is another article on the same topic (Prof O) and a former student's analysis of the NYT

article (they thought a lot of it was spun negatively).

New York Times Distorts Obama's U of Chicago Years

by JohnKWilson
Tue Jul 29, 2008 at 08:36:51 PM PDT

Note: I'm the author of a new book about Obama, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.

Tomorrow's New York Times (July 30) features a lengthy story by Jodi Kantor about Obama's time as a teacher at the University of Chicago Law School. Since I took a class from Obama in the mid-1990s on "Race, Racism, and the Law," I thought I could offer some insights into Obama, and what this article gets wrong. Although the article offers some interesting insights, it also distorts Obama's past and tries to attack Obama's candidacy by using his experiences at the University of Chicago as a way to confirm many of the false assertions made about Obama: that he's a politician who doesn't stand for anything, that he's an aloof elitist, that he only pretends to listen to opposing viewpoints.

JohnKWilson's diary :: ::

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/29/214138/480/246/559106

Con Law

by Jason Zengerle
What the University of Chicago right thinks of Obama.

Post Date Wednesday, July 30, 2008

In the spring of 2000, not long after Barack Obama was trounced in the Democratic primary for a South Side Chicago congressional seat, Daniel Fischel staged an intervention. Meeting with Obama in the main lounge at the University of Chicago Law School, where Fischel was then dean and Obama was a part-time senior lecturer, Fischel offered Obama some unsolicited advice. "I told him that it was obvious his political career was going nowhere," Fischel recalls, "and that he really ought to think about doing something else."

The particular "something else" Fischel had in mind was a full-time tenured professorship; to sweeten the offer, Fischel said the law school would even hire Obama's wife, Michelle, to run its legal clinic. Although the move would require Obama to give up his state Senate seat, Fischel tried to convince his junior colleague that Chicago professor might be a more natural role than Chicago politician for a cerebral guy like him. "I mentioned people who'd been faculty members like Scalia and Posner and Easterbrook and many others who had gone on to very distinguished careers outside of academia or in combination with academia," Fischel says. "I told him he could be a faculty member as well as a public intellectual."

Obama declined Fischel's overture, saying that he wanted to give elected politics another shot. And today, of course, it's hard to find any fault with the wisdom of that decision. Still, the episode is interesting not only as a counterfactual (how much does Hillary Clinton wish Obama had spent last December grading Con Law exams instead of stumping in Iowa?) but as a window onto Obama's relationship with those who don't share his ideology. The University of Chicago Law School, after all, is a famously conservative institution--the birthplace of the law-and-economics movement and the incubator of numerous conservative intellectuals; Fischel himself literally wrote (with Easterbrook) one of the fundamental books on law and economics, in addition to another book arguing that the government's prosecution of Michael Milken was unjust. Yet, eight years ago, there was something about Obama that made Fischel and other Chicago conservative legal scholars want Obama to be their colleague--and today, at least for some of them, maybe even their president.

Obama first came to the University of Chicago Law School's attention via one of its more celebrated conservative faculty members, Michael McConnell, who's now a federal judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and reportedly was on George W. Bush's short list of potential Supreme Court nominees. Back in 1990, when McConnell was still teaching at Chicago, he wrote an article about church- state relations for the Harvard Law Review that Obama, who was then the Law Review's president, edited. As McConnell recently recalled the experience to Politico: "A frequent problem with student editors is that they try to turn an article into something they want it to be. It was striking that Obama didn't do that. He tried to make it better from my point of view." McConnell was so impressed with Obama that he recommended him to the head of Chicago's appointments committee at the time, Douglas Baird, a bankruptcy expert and a law-and-economics devotee. "Michael's a very smart guy who's basically a very good judge of horse flesh--he wouldn't typically recommend people," says Baird.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=86dd0277-c6ee-4e3c-83e9-0bb468c5c40d

[liberalpragmatist]

4. Heh, I found the NYT article to be pretty flattering

Still, the student's reply is interesting. I actually already read the TNR piece -- that too is worth a read.

[Pirate Smile]

11. I did too. A former student left this comment on The Caucus NYT blog re the one comment in the

article which I know people are going to try to spin against Obama.

47. July 29th, 2008 7:27 pm

As a student in his seminar in 1995, I found him very humble and introspective. He did a lot of listening to the students. This was very refreshing. Many of the professors seemed to want to talk most of the time, or call on students who would parrot them.

A common practice on law exams was for the professors to refer to themselves in hypotheticals. It’s basically quirky humor to make final exams less intimidating. I don’t think that’s an example of Obama being egocentric, so much as fitting in.

Also, it should be noted that at least two of the professors quoted in this article are solid Republicans. The Chicago faculty had a number of Democrats (at least 1/3) and some definite progressives, but none were quoted in this article. Given the partisan nature of American politics, that seems very relevant to interpreting their remarks.

— Posted by Susan

[Scurrilous]

6. K & R

:thumbsup:

[Cha]

7. This is so awesome..I've read articles about

his teaching experiences at the UofC but this is even better..and in the NYT!!

Meanwhile rush idiots are getting spoon fed shit that "Obama isn't very smart".

[Pirate Smile]

10. I find that "empty suit"/not smart meme hilarious because of its ridiculousness.

[Cha]

12. They're getting beyond ridiculous..

Books by michael savage weiner, sean hannity, and bill o'lielly were found in the home of the "terrorist" who killed 2 and 7 wounded at the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee because of his "hatred of the Liberal Movement".


http://reclaimthemedia.org/media_literacy_bias/a_murderers_bookshelf_hannity_%3D6100

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-lauria/unitarian-church-shooting_b_115392.html

[TexasObserver]

8. Obama is a legal scholar and a brilliant mind.

He's truly impressive.

[AZBlue]

9. K&R

[woolldog]

15. This is all very interesting. But....

why aren't they subjecting McCain to this kind of scrutiny?

[Frank Booth]

16. I don't think much of this article. It seems very skewed against Obama.

The writer depends almost entirely on Richard Epstein for quotes from colleagues at the U of Chicago -- not exactly the most objective source.

There's no mention of Cass Sunstein (a strong Obama supporter) other than a brief dismissal of him as a liberal, even though in the legal world he's as prominent as Epstein.

The TNR article, which is much better, quoted several colleagues who had positive things to say about Obama's time at Chicago.

This NYT writer apparently felt she'd get a better story if she only quoted colleagues who hold grudges against Obama.

[dkf]

17. Its sad that we are getting the dumbed down easily digestible stuff.

I would love to hear what these people are raving about.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

19. Great find! Thanks!

:thumbsup:

[JoFerret]

24. Interesting that you had such a positive take on the article

It didn't read that way to me although the smarts for sure.

I was thinking - well at least they've slammed McCain in the editorial. That's something.