Young Mr. Obama - By Edward McClelland Page 0,32

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.