On Barnett v. Daley, Obama did associate work: he prepared discovery documents, joined Miner in taking depositions, and wrote memos. The case dragged on through the federal courts until 1998, long after Obama had left the firm for the state senate. The plaintiffs won—sort of. The U.S. District Court of Appeals ordered one Southwest Side ward redrawn to add more black voters. The Irish incumbent won the special election.
Most of Obama’s work at Davis, Miner had a racial or social-justice angle. He won an out-of-court settlement for a black medical equipment salesman who accused his employer of racial harassment. He sued a bank for redlining in black neighborhoods. Obama was deeply involved in a voting rights case, ACORN v. Edgar, in which he sued Illinois’s Republican governor Jim Edgar for refusing to implement the federal National Voter Registration Act. The act, better known as Motor Voter, required states to register voters at the library, the Public Aid Department, and the secretary of state’s office. It forbade purging voters who skipped an election. Given his leadership of Project Vote!, the case was a natural for Obama—a bridge between law and politics, as Project Vote! had been a bridge between community organizing and politics. Having worked with ACORN on Project Vote! Obama saw that registering poor folks would be that much harder if the state refused to obey Motor Voter.
Obama authored ACORN v. Edgar’s final brief, filing it on January 19, 1995, less than a month after Motor Voter took effect.
“ACORN as an organization is aggrieved by the State of Illinois’ failure to comply with the mandatory provisions of the NVRA by January 1, 1995, because such failure significantly impedes ACORN’s ability to effectively promote voter registration which would be much enhanced by the NVRA’s streamlined procedures for mail-in registration and agency-based registration at motor vehicle, public assistance, disability, and other designated offices,” Obama wrote.
“A significant number of ACORN members are registered to vote, but have not voted in the last two preceding calendar years because of a lack of candidates addressing their needs or for other reasons. These members wish to remain registered to vote and would be significantly harmed by being purged from the voting registration rolls, including being deprived of their rights to serve as jurors in federal cases. A significant number of ACORN members are not registered to vote, are not registered at their current residence addresses, or are likely to change their addresses in the foreseeable future. A significant number of ACORN members go to motor vehicle departments to obtain or renew drivers’ licenses, or go to state offices to receive public assistance or disability services. These members would likely register to vote or have their addresses upgraded on their current voter registration if the registration procedures were implemented at these offices in the manner required by the NVRA.”
The Republican-controlled state senate and the state board of elections countered that allowing people to register just anywhere would lead to vote fraud in Chicago—a timeless bugaboo for Illinois Republicans.
While drafting the brief, Obama organized meetings and traded faxes with a half-dozen other civil rights attorneys, soliciting opinions. But he was still a cub lawyer, and this was a hot case. Right after he filed, the League of Women Voters and the Justice Department jumped in. Obama stepped aside, allowing their lawyers to make oral arguments. In fact, he only spoke once during the entire proceedings, when he asked the governor’s attorney whether the state planned to comply with Motor Voter by setting up a two-tier system that would only allow people to register for federal elections at the secretary of state’s.
“Other people really took the lead in court,” Steve Melton, an attorney for the Cook County clerk’s office, would recall. “He was younger. Some of us were older than him. Other attorneys were from large firms, so it was natural to defer to them. Once the suit was filed, and it got some momentum, he still attended court hearings. It became evident early on that the judge was on our side. Others took more of a role in pushing the case forward.”
A federal judge ordered Illinois to implement Motor Voter. The victory won Obama some attention from a good-government group that would later support his political career: the Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization. As its doubly independent title suggests, IVI-IPO represents the anti-Daley strain in Chicago politics. The group is especially influential in Hyde Park, where it was founded. For his work on ACORN v. Edgar, Obama won the IVI-IPO’s Legal Eagle Award. During a dinner at the Blackstone Hotel, he was handed the plaque by Senator Paul Simon, every do-gooder’s favorite political Boy Scout and a man who would one day play a big role in making Obama a United States senator.
Winning the Harvard Law Review presidency may have been the most important election of Obama’s life. It provided him with a golden ticket to Chicago’s upper class, preparing the way for all his later achievements. Had Obama simply been a black Harvard Law grad—or a white Law Review president—he wouldn’t have been offered so much publicity, so much money, and so many jobs, from journalists, publishers, law firms, and political donors. But as the first black man to hold the world’s most prestigious law school post, Obama was a blue-chip prospect, especially in Chicago, which is used to losing its brightest law students to New York and Washington. The Law Review presidency scored him a fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his election to the U.S. Senate and where he finally met Judge Abner Mikva, who became his first political mentor.
Obama’s great-uncle Charles Payne was a librarian at the U of C. Payne, the brother of Obama’s grandmother Madelyn Dunham, boasted to a law librarian that his nephew was the first African-American president of the Law Review. The law librarian passed the intelligence on to Douglas Baird, chairman of the law school’s Appointment Committee. Baird was perplexed, because Payne was a WASP.
“Sorry, you must be mistaken,” he told the librarian. “I know Charles Payne, and he may have a nephew who’s the president of the Harvard Law Review, but he doesn’t have a nephew who is the first black to hold that position.”
Shortly after, Baird received a visit from Michael McConnell, a colleague who would one day be named a federal judge by George W. Bush. McConnell had just published an article in the Harvard Law Review and raved about this kid named Obama who’d done a brilliant job editing it.
“He should be on our radar screen,” McConnell suggested. “He might be interested in teaching law.”
Baird dialed the same Cambridge phone number that so many other lawyers were calling that spring and got Obama on the line.
“I’m not interested in teaching law,” Obama told Baird. “I’ve got a contract to write a book on voting rights. That’s going to occupy most of my first year after law school.”
(After the New York Times published an article about Obama’s Law Review presidency, a literary agent landed him a $125,000 contract with Simon and Schuster. Due to the demands of law school, Obama was unable to finish the project. He later took a more modest advance from Times Books, for the book that became Dreams from My Father.)
“Why don’t you write the book here?” Baird suggested. “We’ll make you a law and government fellow. We can pay you a token salary and give you an office with a word processor.”
If Obama did decide to teach law, Baird calculated, he’d already be on the U of C campus. And as every attorney knows, possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Obama accepted Baird’s offer and hunkered down to work inside the law school, a six-story glass building with an inch-deep fountain in the courtyard. Its boxy frame and dark reflective windows rhyme not at all with the Oxonian courtyards on the main campus, built in the early twentieth century with John D. Rockefeller’s fortune. After Obama had been at the school about a month, he returned to Baird’s office and told him the book had taken an unexpected turn.
“It’s really less a book about voting rights than it is my autobiography,” he reported.
Baird was a little surprised—Obama seemed awfully young to be writing an autobiography�
�but he wanted to indulge his prize catch.
“That’s not a problem,” Baird said. “You should write the book you’re going to write.”
In the fall of 1992, as Obama was winding up Project Vote! and typing away on Dreams from My Father, Baird prevailed on him to teach a seminar called “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” The assignment came with a new title, lecturer in law, which Baird hoped would be the first step toward a professorship.
U of C is one of American academia’s most expensive gigs. It’s not quite the Ivy League, but your bank account can’t tell the difference. At that time, both the faculty and the student body were 90 percent white. Obama’s fifteen-student seminar drew a disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latinos. Not only were they excited about a class on minority rights, they were inspired to see a black teacher. Baird told a Latino student named Jesse Ruiz to go see Obama. Ruiz found the new lecturer sitting in his office, working on his autobiography. Taking time out to talk, Obama told Ruiz he had worked as an organizer in Roseland.
“I grew up in Roseland,” Ruiz said, astonished.
Obama mentioned his Law Review presidency—he mentioned it often in those days, before he entered political circles where the Law Review presidency wasn’t enough to get him what he wanted and where bragging about it actually turned people off. Ruiz realized he’d heard of the guy before. Prior to law school, Ruiz had worked at a steel mill in Indiana. He was sitting at his desk one day when he read about the first black Law Review president. I’m not going to be in the steel industry forever, Ruiz had thought, and if this African-American guy who worked in Chicago could be head of the Law Review, I could go to law school. Soon after, he enrolled at U of C.
Although his students might have welcomed it, Obama didn’t use the seminar to preach liberal remedies for racial ills. That has never been his political style, and it wasn’t his teaching style, either. He covered Supreme Court decisions from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education to Plyler v. Doe, a Texas case that granted rights to all schoolchildren, regardless of immigrant status. He asked his students to see whites’ side of the issues—“Sometimes people have an inherent belief in some things,” he explained, perhaps thinking back to his grandmother’s suspicion of black men. And he warned the minority students not to carry their grievances into the courtroom.
“Just don’t go with your gut,” he told them. “As a Latino or African-American or an Asian lawyer, you’re going to have issues, but you’re going to have to keep that out of thinking like a lawyer.”
Later, when he became a senior lecturer, Obama taught constitutional law. Jim Madigan, a student who later became a law school lecturer himself, took Obama’s class in the late 1990s. Madigan was worried that a black professor teaching a roomful of white kids about slavery would make for some uncomfortable mornings. Obama flashed his liberal leanings by approaching cases from the point of view of the aggrieved party, whether it was Dred Scott, the slave suing for his freedom, or Michael Hardwick, a homosexual convicted of sodomy in Georgia in 1982. But even in the Dred Scott case, Obama was able to credit the concerns of slave owners, who expected to see their property rights respected, and of the Supreme Court, which worried that ruling in favor of a black man would incite the Southern states to secede. Overall, though, he believed that courts should play an active role in righting injustices.
As a gay man, Madigan was interested in how Obama would approach Bowers v. Hardwick, the sodomy case. Obama was not just a straight, married man. He was a smooth, handsome guy. Women crushed on Obama. That set him apart from the gray, abstracted professors who made up most of the law faculty.
“I remember myself, as a gay guy, when the Bowers case was on the horizon, I was a little interested in how it would be taken up, because he just had the vibe of a ladies’ guy,” Madigan would remember. “I guess I was surprised at how well he handled it. It was pretty consistent that he approached that case the same way that he approached the Dred Scott case, taking the perspective of this African-American guy, taking the perspective of this gay guy. I think there was a model of consistency there that I always found pretty impressive, because the thing that was very personal for me, but was pretty alien for him, he handled in the same way that something that seemed very personal to him but was pretty alien to me, like a race-based law.”
Obama’s preoccupation with the human consequences of a case, rather than simply legal doctrine, was just one way he cut against the grain of the law school’s culture. U of C professors are sharply intellectual: At lunch in the faculty lounge, they enjoy a bloodthirsty debate on the merits of a Supreme Court decision far more than a discussion of how the case will affect a poor South Side family living a few miles from campus. In the classroom, the give-and-take is equally aggressive: One professor, who is now a federal judge, once reduced a student to tears. (Obama’s lectures were more conversational. He was less interested in pontificating than in drawing students into the discussion. Unlike judges, politicians want to be liked.) U of C is a citadel of legal thought, known especially for its conservative thinkers. Richard Posner, the school’s most prominent scholar, was appointed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals by Ronald Reagan. Richard Epstein, a corporate law expert, became an Obama critic who took the negative in a debate titled “Should Conservatives Vote for Obama?” Still, U of C is an urban, intellectual, cosmopolitan institution, so its professors tend to be libertarians rather than social conservatives. They are more devoted to free markets than traditional values. (The economics school, whose many Nobel Prize winners share the same viewpoint, has a research institute named for Milton Friedman, a former faculty member.)
“The idea of being fervent about personal liberties is not really that out of sync with a lot of civil rights issues, at least civil rights issues as they emerged in the sixties and seventies” is Baird’s explanation of how the faculty squares its philosophic conservatism with the personal liberalism that prevails in Hyde Park. “Everyone in the law school would be absolutely committed to not tolerating racial discrimination at all, not tolerating gender discrimination, or discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, or anything like that.”
Conservative liberalism sounds like an academic affectation, but “if you try to use the word ‘conservative liberal,’ you’re missing the point,” Baird would say. “They’re against big government, but that’s not the same as being against voting rights.”
As a teacher, Obama was well liked, but he wasn’t a star, even after he was elected to the state senate. Most students were more excited about taking classes from federal judges or full-time professors. A legislator just wasn’t as glamorous. When Obama auctioned off a day in Springfield for a law school charity auction, it went for a few hundred dollars. Obama didn’t spend a lot of time in the faculty lounge, either. Lecturers weren’t expected to join in the law school’s intense repartee. They had day jobs. Obama could be spotted early in the mornings drinking coffee in the downstairs Green Lounge, or playing basketball in the gym after work.
“Conservative liberalism” had no appeal to a lecturer who’d learned his politics in Altgeld Gardens. But Obama did find like-minded allies at the law school. Cass Sunstein, a constitutional law expert who became the most-cited legal expert in America, was Obama’s closest friend there. (Obama would appoint Sunstein to his administration as “regulatory czar.”) Both were progressive Democrats, but they were pragmatists, too. Sunstein hardened Obama’s practical streak, testing his ideas with exacting debates and nudging him in the direction of judicial minimalism, the idea that judges should decide cases as narrowly as possible, rather than boldly remaking the law. At the University of Chicago, no answer is ever deemed definitive, and every answer begets further questions. That intellectual rigor could later be seen in the way Obama approached his work as a legislator, trying to find common ground by bringing together parties with conflicting views.
Obama also met Elena Kagan at U of C. She went on to serve as dean of
Harvard Law School, until he appointed her U.S. solicitor general then Supreme Court justice.
If you walk through the main lobby of the law school today, the first room to the left has this plaque outside the door:
BARACK OBAMA
SENIOR LECTURER 1996–2004
LECTURER IN LAW 1992–1996
FELLOW IN LAW AND GOVERNMENT 1991–1992
FORTY-FOURTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
UNITED STATES SENATOR 2005–2008
ILLINOIS STATE SENATOR 1997–2004
DURING HIS TWELVE YEARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
CHICAGO LAW SCHOOL, MR. OBAMA TAUGHT
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW III, CURRENT ISSUES IN RACISM
AND THE LAW, AND VOTING RIGHTS AND THE
DEMOCRATIC PROCESS. CLASSROOM V WAS HIS
FAVORITE ROOM IN WHICH TO TEACH.
Classroom V, a tiered amphitheater seating eighty students, is also where Obama developed the eloquence that, when seasoned with the call-and-response rhythms of the black church, made him the greatest political speaker of his generation. As a constitutional law professor, his job was to encourage open conversation among students of vastly differing political views.
“Where in the Constitution do we find justification for Roe v. Wade?” he would ask. “How do we reconcile this understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment as it applies to sexual orientation?”
No other presidential candidate ever spent so much time thinking deeply about the fundamental doctrines of American legal thought or the nuances of the American Constitution. His public voice, the soaring rhetoric of the 2004 convention speech or Election Night 2008, grew naturally out of the legal discussions in that classroom. Obama taught the Emancipation Proclamation there, speaking the words of Lincoln. The oratory of an earlier era of American thinkers was familiar to him, as to no other politician, but he would use those antique cadences to express a worldview more modern than any other politician’s. Lincoln had done the same, freeing the slaves with a document that could have been composed by Cicero. It’s an advantage of being a lawyer-president, but it was only part of Obama’s education as a public speaker. As he would learn, in a later campaign for office, a politician can’t simply talk like a professor. A speech and a lecture are not the same thing.
Young Mr. Obama Page 8