Barack Obama was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. The NY Times carried a story about this in Februrary 1990, which included a few quotes from Obama:
"The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress," Mr. Obama said today in an interview. "It's encouraging." "But it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance," he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment... On his goals in his new post, Mr. Obama said: "I personally am interested in pushing a strong minority perspective. I'm fairly opinionated about this. But as president of the law review, I have a limited role as only first among equals." Therefore, Mr. Obama said, he would concentrate on making the review a "forum for debate," bringing in new writers and pushing for livelier, more accessible writing.
For what it's worth, a quick look at volume 104 of the Harvard Law Review suggests that not surprisingly given the genre, Obama didn't succeed in publishing "livelier, more accessible writing." But with regard to "new writers," the extremely prestigious Supreme Court term Foreword that year was written by Robin West, now of Georgetown, but who was then a professor at University of Maryland. Prof. West, moreover, didn't have the typical pedigree, having graduated from University Maryland Law School (yes, in theory completely irrelevant to her credentials to write the Foreword, but if I know my elite law review editors, something that gave many of them significant pause.) More typically, the Review invited Guido Calabresi (dean, Yale), Kathleen Sullivan (professor, Harvard), and Morton Horwitz (professor, Harvard) to write the next three years' Forewords. Prof. West is a very prolific, influential scholar, and was an inspired choice from outside the usual group of elite law school professors the HLR would consider. Call this the Obama effect, perhaps, though I'd be interested in hearing from readers who were editors that year about his effect on HLR culture.
Obama pretty much bailed on a legal career which included stellar prospects. It will be tough to take him down by inquiring into this. This question in particular only highlights his accomplishments (to most people+lawyers).
It sounds like just nitpicking on Obama, but that's not surprising, given the author of this post.
[Remainder of post deleted by OK.]
I Obama utterly tiresome. I would never vote for him - he's a socialist pretending to be Mr. Change. The audacity of nonsense is a better title for his self-preening tome.
No actually it highlights how utterly devoid of any meaningful accomplishments his life has been that his supporters have to go all the way back to law school to find any "accomplishments."
I just see this as modesty and humility. What is wrong with that?
DB apparently does not wish to be opaque, with his presidential race topics largely being limited to Ron Paul on the GOP side and Barack Obama on the Democratic side.
Wonder what those two gentlemen have in common...
Can't say I'm surprised to see kneejerk reactions to this post though... we can take a cue from current political parlance and call it Bernstein Derangement Syndrome. If you don't think it exists, you probably have it.
Barak, name *one*.
The utter brilliance of that post should not go unnoticed.
I also call bull on this. By 1990, I'd posit that Harvard had been making special exceptions to its admissions policies for Blacks for a full generation. Harvard certainly wasn't working to keep the Black man down.
I didn't make the law review at my alma matter and for that I can blame only myself. During my tenure at law school, law review was the absolute meritocracy. No one was admitted who didn't grade on or write on by the merits. It was also the most lilly white group of people on campus.
I don't know about Harvard, but I've heard that other elite institutions have affirmative action admissions to law review. Do we have reason to believe that Obama made it on the merits, or should he receive the same level of skepticism that Clarence Thomas does?
You can parse that statement two ways. What Houston Lawyer is seeing is that there are lots of black students who applied to Harvard that are just as equally talented as Barack, but didn't get into Harvard. What I'm seeing, there are lots of black students who never get a high school education who are just as talented as Barack but are held down by poverty and drug use.
I'm thinking that Barack meant the second meaning, not the first.
I see you've googled [she-troll who shall not be named].
Well he did graduate magna cum laude, which today is limited to the top 10% of the class excluding the any summas. (Summa is awarded to those that have an average between A and A+; it is earned by 1 person every 5 years or so.)
Well, considering that it is 2008, and the statement you object to was made in 1990 (or thereabouts), I am not sure what the relevance of your question is.
Despite some obvious parallels, I think the differences between Lincoln and Obama will be illustrated by the substance of their ideas. In Lincoln's case, everything emanated from the Declaration of Independence, whereas Obama, like Thurgood Marshall, gives lip service to the Declaration while believing in his heart that something more like Chief Justice Taney's view was the true historical understanding that must be overcome through progressive politics.
Only then can we determine what his tenure as HLS president says about his qualifications to be President of the United States.
You shouldn't so stipulate. Because that confounds the entry qualifications with the outcome per. I'm sure plenty of people who benefited from affirmative action have ended up doing very well and that doesn't mean they didn't receive affirmative action.
You mean, it's not Barry Hughes O'Bama? Does this mean he's no longer a member of the Hibernians?
Nick
Also, the quote of Obama's that seem to have gotten people talking about affirmative action seems to be pretty unobjectionable regardless of one's views of affirmative action. What he was saying is that one black person achieving a first, while definitely a good thing, should not mean that racial problems are solved. If you oppose affirmative action, that statement should fit right in with an oft-heard conservative objection to affirmative action -- which is that it is just tokenism that makes white liberal happy, but does not address problems where they should be addressed, i.e. at the roots, with the break-down of the family, etc., and just masks the real problems. Further, the statement that "there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance" is completely unobjectionable as well, and probably was not meant to be an endorsement of racial quotas (or more hidden types of affirmative action).
If I didn't know better, I would think certain commenters are just going out of their way to criticize affirmative action, when it has nothing to do with the post. (Incidentally, if you read the story on how Obama got elected president of the HLR (not sure DB links it), you will see that he was in some sense a compromise pick, who the more conservative students backed as they saw him as much more open to them than other, more conventional liberals.)
Beneficiaries of admissions preferences are highly unlikely to perform as well as their nonpreferred peers. Obama's achievement actually says nothing about AA. It was only because of the prevalence of AA that I brought it up. I'm perfectly comfortable with the fact that he achieved this on his own. But I had to be shown evidence to overcome the presumption that he was given what he in fact earned.
Obama is the one real good credit Harvard Law School's Law Review can be proud of.
_______________________
Well, in all fairness, chief editor Louis Brandeis had an above average career. But whatever.
"Show the man some respect: his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and he'd appreciate it if you used it! Gosh!!"
"Barack" is, after all, a local transliteration of "Baruch". What's the matter, Mordecai, ya' got a problem with Jewish names?
At the very least, it functions as a signaling device. Employers can use a law review resume line as the attestation that someone, somewhere, tested a number of students and determined that this candidate was some combination of very smart and very hardworking. Whether that's an accurate or useful signal is another question, although most employers seem to put some stock in it.
Held down by poverty and drug use. That's one way of looking at it.
If only drug use weren't holding these talented people down, why, they could go to Harvard!
Too bad such talent isn't accompanied by common sense, i.e. "maybe I shouldn't take these drugs so I can get a job and eventually work myself out of poverty." Too bad these people are held down by some sinister force, most likely white.
1. having presided over a general "dumbing down" of previously observed standards for defining scholarly material worthy of publication in the nation's leading law journal (with unconventional, sometimes sloppy, sometimes even profane, material now counting as publishable "scholarship"); and
2. having been somewhat indifferent, even lazy, in the execution of his day-to-day editorial responsibilities, with a concrete result: the final published content of the Review was not as rigorously thought out, and tightly edited, as had previously been the case with the Review.
I wonder whether someone (ATTENTION: DAVID BERNSTEIN?) might do a citation analysis comparing the average number of post-1991 law review citations to Obama's Volume 104, as opposed to the average number of citations to volumes produced under the direction of other presidents, in hopes of objectively confirming or refuting impressions #1 and #2 as to Obama's work as president.
If, in fact, Obama did a solid job as president of the only institution which, apparently, he's ever run, one would expect that the results of his work would be recognized by citation rates to his volume at least on par with (and ideally above) the citation rates to volumes produced by other Review presidents.
Further as to #1, my impression is that Obama's lowering of standards for what constitutes publishable material, in an effort to appease the radical element on the Review which didn't want to adhere to traditional standards, played a key role in the turmoil which engulfed the Review during the two years immediately following his tenure. The two presidents who had the misfortune to follow Obama found it impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, and they endured personal castigation on multiple fronts for their unsuccessful efforts to clean up after Obama -- to try to beat back the radical element on the Review which had been emboldened by Obama's "live and let live" philosophy.
My impressions, at any rate. It will be interesting to see whether journalists find it worthwhile to poke into such matters, particularly by interviewing Obama and other ex-editors about them.
Further, it may be that the numbers are skewed by one truly seminal and important work, with an extraordinary number of citations, being published by one journal in one of the years being studied. Thus it may be necessary to throw out outliers, like the most and least cited articles from each journal in each year.
I just see this as modesty and humility. What is wrong with that?
If it's just humility, he would have said "students" instead of "black students"--it's certainly true for students in general.
By specifically mentioning black students he was making a point beyond his literal words. Exactly what point you choose to read into it is up to dispute, but it's not just humility.
As to sources, having served as an editor of the Review myself (indeed, having direct knowledge of the time period in question), I am relying for my impressions mostly on various nonpublic sources.
In terms of published material on point, you might take a glance at the book written by Eleanor Kerlow shortly after the events in question, which devotes considerable detail to the problems which broke out on the Harvard Law Review during the two years following Obama's "dumbing down" of standards at the Review (my terminology, not hers), thereby emboldening the radical element on the Review to challenge efforts to reinstate traditional scholarly standards. The book is Poisoned Ivy: How Egos, Ideology, and Power Politics Almost Ruined Harvard Law School (1994) (see National Review piece on it here).
It's no great work of literature, but it does convey the basic facts. Even though Kerlow comes at the subject from a heavily liberal perspective, Obama doesn't come off looking particularly good.
As I said previosly, it's clear most people on the Review liked Obama (he was "likeable enough," one might say), something Kerlow acknowledges. However, that's not to say that Obama's fellow editors thought he diligently carried out his responsibilities, as president, to ensure that the material published by the Review was of the highest possible quality.
Quite the contrary: as Kerlow recounts, the editors in the class behind Obama, in electing their own president, rejected the Obama model and elected someone with high standards and a strong work ethic who they thought could reinstate traditional editorial practices. As she explains on page 11 of Poisoned Ivy:
"Obama was friendly and outgoing, but the class succeeding him wanted a tougher editor to lead them. [David] Ellen, quiet and fair-haired, had graduated summa cum laude in history and science from Harvard College in 1987. He had worked at The New Republic in 1989, the summer before starting law school, and was seen as someone who would be a more rigorous blue-penciler."
True, Kerlow doesn't use the word "lazy," but the contrast drawn between the glad-handing, laid-back Obama and the serious and hard-working Ellen captures what I'm pretty sure was the impression of most editors (at least the editors who graduated in 1992, a year after Obama) at the time. Possibly Obama can be regarded as having exhibited at least minimal competence in the discharge of his duties, but it's difficult to score him any higher in terms of his job performance in the only executive position, apparently, he has held to date.
I look forward to any statistics David Bernstein or anyone else ends up compiling in an effort to measure Obama's level of achievement in his prior executive role. If his volume of the Review doesn't stack up very well to other voluumes, I agree with the comment that there should be a check against another leading review or two to make sure 1990-91 wasn't just a dry year for legal scholarship generally.
Having a $1 million + home is a strike against a candidate for the American presidency? And as for the Rezko thing, as a lawyer, was he supposed to tell his firm that he wasn't going to defend one of their clients?
I guess I just disagree. To me, having a nice home is his right as a hard working, gifted professional. If he lived in a $20 million dollar cube in Millenium Park, I might think differently. But $1 million for a nice home in Chicago is not snobbery or arrogance.
And big law firms do work for all kinds of clients, including "nasty" ones. Nasty clients deserve representation too. And though I do not plan to end up in a big firm (mostly my fault, not theirs), I would not criticize someone for taking on their firm's case. That sort of thing is hardly voluntary.
I've run electronic searches to determine the number of times Obama's volume 104, and every other volume of the Harvard Law Review published during the last 20 years, has been cited in all law reviews during each subsequent year for which full data is available (starting in the year after the last issue of each volume appeared, and running through 2006, the last year for which full citation data is currently available).
The results of my searches are in a PDF which you can download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?bxdzmmtuanx.
Some highlights, using only the first 12 years of citations to each volume, where available (obviously, the more recent volumes have fewer years of citations available):
1. Obama's volume 104 (1990-91) has been cited an average of 170 times a year. That is, it was cited 2045 times in the first 12 full years after publication (i.e., 1992 to 2003). It has been cited at the lowest rate of any volume published in the past 20 years.
2. By comparison, for all other volumes published during the past twenty years for which at least a year's worth of data is available (vols. 101 to 103, and vols. 105 to 118), they have been cited an average of 262 times a year -- a rate 54% higher than the citation rate for Obama's volume. Here's a summary:
Volume 101 (1987-1988): 2850 citations in 12 years -- 238 citations per year
Volume 102 (1988-1989): 2135 citations in 12 years -- 178 citations per year
Volume 103 (1989-1990): 2825 citations in 12 years -- 235 citations per year
Volume 105 (1991-1992): 2357 citations in 12 years -- 196 citations per year
Volume 106 (1992-1993): 2694 citations in 12 years -- 225 citations per year
Volume 107 (1993-1994): 2625 citations in 12 years -- 219 citations per year
Volume 108 (1994-1995): 2132 citations in 11 years -- 194 citations per year
Volume 109 (1995-1996): 2256 citations in 10 years -- 226 citations per year
Volume 110 (1996-1997): 2146 citations in 9 years -- 238 citations per year
Volume 111 (1997-1998): 2209 citations in 8 years -- 276 citations per year
Volume 112 (1998-1999): 1385 citations in 7 years -- 198 citations per year
Volume 113 (1999-2000): 1413 citations in 6 years -- 236 citations per year
Volume 114 (2000-2001): 1214 citations in 5 years -- 243 citations per year
Volume 115 (2001-2002): 1193 citations in 4 years -- 298 citations per year
Volume 116 (2002-2003): 1032 citations in 3 years -- 344 citations per year
Volume 117 (2003-2004): 860 citations in 2 years -- 430 citations per year
Volume 118 (2004-2005): 476 citations in 1 year -- 476 citations per year
3. Much of this disparity remains even if one focuses on the volumes produced during the same era as Obama's volume, to cancel out the effect of historical trends affecting legal publishing and scholarship, and the effect of the later volumes having less than 12 years of subsequent citations (which tends to enhance the average citations per year, as a greater percentage of the average is represented by recent years, with high citations to fresh sources).
Consider the 7 volumes published between 1988 and 1994, as to which a full 12 years of subsequent citation data are available, so that the citation rates are readily comparable.
The 3 volumes published just before Obama's volume (101, 102, and 103) were in the following 12 years cited an average of 217 times a year -- a rate 28% higher than the citation rate for Obama's volume.
The 3 volumes published just after Obama's volume (105, 106, and 107) were in the following 12 years cited an average of 213 times a year -- a rate 25% higher than the citation rate for Obama's volume.
I agree with Tony that for your numbers to show more than the operation of chance, you'd first have to disprove, using data from Yale and ideally another journal slightly less prestigious than Harvard, the hypothesis that 1990-1991 was an exceptionally bad year for legal scholarship -- a hypothesis which, if not disproved, would mean that the low citation count couldn't be attributed to poor performance by Obama.
I also agree with Tony that if, indeed, Obama and his crew messed up and didn't attract the top-notch scholarship, then logic would dictate that you'd find evidence of such poor performance in the citation counts at other journals. That is, the citation counts at other journals would rise, as they would have benefited during 1990-91 from the alleged poor performance by Obama and company. Right?