Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart
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.
At a formal institution, Barack Obama
was a loose presence, joking with students about their romantic
prospects, using first names, referring to case law one moment and “The
Godfather” the next. He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow
faculty members guessing about his precise views.
Mr. Obama, now the junior senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, spent 12 years at the University of Chicago
Law School. Most aspiring politicians do not dwell in the halls of
academia, and few promising young legal thinkers toil in state
legislatures. Mr. Obama planted a foot in each, splitting his weeks
between an elite law school and the far less rarefied atmosphere of the
Illinois Senate.
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.
Standing
in his favorite classroom in the austere main building, sharp-witted
students looming above him, Mr. Obama refined his public speaking style,
his debating abilities, his beliefs.
“He
tested his ideas in classrooms,” said Dennis Hutchinson, a colleague.
Every seminar hour brought a new round of, “Is affirmative action
justified? Under what circumstances?” as Mr. Hutchinson put it.
But
Mr. Obama’s years at the law school are also another chapter — see
United States Senate, c. 2006 — in which he seemed as intently focused
on his own political rise as on the institution itself. Mr. Obama, who
declined to be interviewed for this article, was well liked at the law
school, yet he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some
colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage. The
Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law
schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable
conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one
can quite point to it.
“I
don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said
Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr.
Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His
entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a
thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the
plate and taken full swings.”
Mr.
Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races
during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction,
along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic
debates over “whether to drop a footnote or not drop a footnote,” said
Abner J. Mikva, a mentor whose own career has spanned Congress, the
federal bench and the same law school.
Douglas Baird, another colleague, remembers once asking Mr. Obama to assess potential candidates for governor.
“First of all, I’m not running for governor, “ Mr. Obama told him. “But if I did, I would expect you to support me.”
He was a third-year state senator at the time.
Popular and Enigmatic
Mr.
Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell,
a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As
president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr.
McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than
that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office
and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My
Father.”
The
school had almost no black faculty members, a special embarrassment
given its location on the South Side. Its sleek halls bordered a
neighborhood crumbling with poverty and neglect. In his 2000
Congressional primary race, Representative Bobby L. Rush, a former Black
Panther running for re-election, used Mr. Obama’s ties to the school to
label him an egghead and an elitist.
At
the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior
lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His
most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection
areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the
evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to
contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama
was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a
professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the
field.
His
most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a
legal one, was on racism and law. Mr. Obama improvised his own textbook,
including classic cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by
Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.
Mr.
Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of
the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims,
including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and
fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and
some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment,
to gawkers.
“Are
there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but
racism from the past?” Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in
Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994.
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.)
Challenging Assumptions
Liberals
flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a
progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against
racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper
sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across
the aisle.
“On
the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the
needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role
in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or
environmental protection,” Mr. Obama said.
But
the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people
who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t
that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now
teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.
For
one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal
policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era
amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance,
the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting
rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He
was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a
contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.
For
another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try
arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were
better athletes than white ones.
“I
remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary
Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled.
In
his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for
structuring elections differently to increase minority representation.
Opponents attacked those suggestions when Ms. Guinier was nominated as
assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, costing her the
post.
“I think he thought they were good and worth trying,” said David Franklin, who now teaches law at DePaul University in Chicago.
But
whether out of professorial reserve or budding political caution, Mr.
Obama would not say so directly. “He surfaced all the competing points
of view on Guinier’s proposals with total neutrality and equanimity,”
Mr. Franklin said. “He just let the class debate the merits of them back
and forth.”
While
students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes
wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to
support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police
to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to
gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they
say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil
Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that
supported it out of concern about crime.
“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.
Nor
could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never
published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was
unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically,
as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,”
Mr. Epstein said.
The
Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that
burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat
over lunch at a special round table in the university’s faculty club,
and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr.
Obama rarely attended, even when he was in town.
“I’m
not sure he was close to anyone,” Mr. Hutchinson said, except for a few
liberal constitutional law professors, like Cass Sunstein, now an
occasional adviser to his campaign. Mr. Obama was working two other
jobs, after all, in the State Senate and at a civil rights law firm.
Several
colleagues say Mr. Obama was surely influenced by the ideas swirling
around the law school campus: the prevailing market-friendliness, or
economic analysis of the impact of laws. But none could say how. “I’m
not sure we changed him,” Mr. Baird said.
Because
he never fully engaged, Mr. Obama “doesn’t have the slightest sense of
where folks like me are coming from,” Mr. Epstein said. “He was a
successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues.”
Leaving the Classroom
As
Mr. Obama built his political career, his so-called groupies became an
early core of supporters, handing out leaflets and hosting fund-raisers
in their modest apartments.
“Maybe
we charged an audacious $20?” said Jesse Ruiz, now a corporate lawyer
in Chicago. Mr. Obama was sheepish asking for even that, Mr. Ruiz
recalls. With no staff, Mr. Obama would come by the day after a
fund-raiser to stuff the proceeds into a backpack.
Mr.
Obama never mentioned his humiliating, hopeless campaign against Mr.
Rush in class (he lost by a two-to-one margin), though colleagues
noticed that he seemed exhausted and was smoking more than usual.
Soon
after, the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet:
Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was
making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A
job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.
Your
political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told
Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down. Two years later, he
decided to run for the Senate. He canceled his course load and has not
taught since.
Now,
watching the news, it is dawning on Mr. Obama’s former students that he
was mining material for his political future even as he taught them.
Byron
Rodriguez, a real estate lawyer in San Francisco, recalls his
professor’s admiration for the soaring but plainspoken speeches of
Frederick Douglass.
“No
one speaks this way anymore,” Mr. Obama told his class, wondering aloud
what had happened to the art of political oratory. In particular, Mr.
Obama admired Douglass’s use of a collective voice that embraced black
and white concerns, one that Mr. Obama has now adopted himself.
In
class, Mr. Obama sounded many of the same themes he does on the
campaign trail, Ms. Callahan said, ticking them off: “self-determinism
as opposed to paternalism, strength in numbers, his concept of community
development.”
But
as a professor, students say, Mr. Obama was in the business of
complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended
consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved,
that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next.
So
even some former students who are thrilled at Mr. Obama’s success wince
when they hear him speaking like the politician he has so fully become.
“When
you hear him talking about issues, it’s at a level so much simpler than
the one he’s capable of,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He was a lot more fun to
listen to back then.”
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