Obama’s First Presidency

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/28/9950/

Obama’s First Presidency
Sydney Morning Herald/Australia
by Geoffrey Robertson


If Barack Obama is elected president of the United States, it will be the result of another presidential election, in February 1990.

Then, 80 of his Harvard classmates chose him as the first black scholar to preside over the editing of the 140th edition of their law review. That instantly brought him to national attention, with featured articles in The New York Times and other major newspapers, a book contract and 700 job offers from all the best law firms. He was a mature student of 27 at the time and after graduation worked for several years as a community lawyer before ascending the greasy pole of Illinois politics. What does this period of this life, as a lawyer, foretell?

There are very few back issues of the Harvard Law Review available in Britain. I tracked down volume 140 in a deserted floor of the Middle Temple library, above the amazing Molyneux globe that guided Sir Walter Raleigh to the new world. It was unthumbed, probably since 1990; so much for the curiosity of our law students. It weighed in at 1964 pages, comprising learned articles, students’ case notes and book reviews, with many thousands of footnotes compiled by its eager editors.

The university law review is an American phenomenon that has no parallel in Britain’s lazier and less academic law schools: the notion of an elite group of students determining, by the juristic contributions they choose to solicit, the focus of contemporary legal thinking would cause apoplexy in Oxbridge common rooms. But in the US, law reviews are important in shaping the law, and Harvard is the most important of all.

Hence the newsworthiness of Obama’s election. Never before had there been a black editor-in-chief. “The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” he said at a news conference. “But you have to remember that for every one of me there are hundreds of thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance” because of poverty and family drug environments.

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It is sobering to think that unless Obama is elected it is unlikely that the Supreme Court, its balance changed by just one more Republican appointment, will uphold that principle again, at least for the next decade.

Obama’s legal career never took off, for all its historic promise at Harvard. He turned his back on the glamour of trial attorneyship and the mega bucks of a prestige partnership, preferring to help house the poor. That may have been the result of careful calculation, as the quickest way to a political career. Or it may simply be that Barack Obama, despite being a lawyer, is in fact a good person.

[OhioChick]

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