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