Obama kept Law Review balanced

[dtotire]

Good Article

Barack Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 gave him his first moment of national fame, a powerful intellectual credential and a sweet book deal. It was also his first electoral victory, won in part by convincing the conservative minority of law students that he would treat them fairly.

While Obama's title and his election have become well-known parts of his personal story, the substance of his actual work on the Review, where he spent at least 50 hours a week, has received little attention.


read the rest:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11257.html

[Pirate Smile]

1. An interesting section:

But Obama, who this March referred to "identity politics" as "an enormous distraction," was not so easily pinned down. He published a searing attack on affirmative action by a former Reagan Administration official. And when, in an unusual move, he selected a young woman from a non-Ivy League law school to fill one of the Review’s most prestigious slots, she produced an essay focused on individual responsibilities as much as on liberties, which criticized both conservative judges and feminist scholars.

"I was very surprised and honored to receive the invitation, of course, as I was teaching at Maryland Law School at the time, and the Forward typically is extended to more established scholars at ‘top’ law schools," wrote Robin West, now a professor and associate dean at Georgetown Law Center, in an e-mail to Politico. While other articles are selected by the Review's editors as a group, the Forward is solicited by a smaller band led by the Review president.

West worked closely with Obama on her piece, she said, recalling him as gracious and helpful, if a bit polite, even formal: "He would always ask first about my baby," she recalled.

If the editor and author — a black man and a woman — were an unconventional team for the Review, however, West's article challenged the then-prevailing wisdom in a different way, taking as its touchstone the work of Czech freedom fighter Vaclav Havel and the anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe that were then still underway. Havel had written that the citizen’s sense of responsibility — not just of individual rights — was essential to political liberty, and West applied that critique to contemporary liberalism to argue that goals like tolerance and diversity might in fact be "weakened, not strengthened, by taking rights so 'super-seriously' that we come to stop examining our sense of responsibility."

Obama "clearly agreed with me at the time that a shift in constitutional thinking from a rights-based discourse to one that centered responsibility and duties ... would be a good thing," West told Politico. "Partly because of those conversations, I don't find it surprising at all that Sen. Obama's speeches are often marked by calls to spark a sense of responsibility, rather than a sense of grievance."