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Chapter Five

EMERGENCE AND ACHIEVEMENT

HARVARD LAW SCHOOL

SEPTEMBER 1988–MAY 1991

Omar Onyango Obama, the younger brother whom Barack Obama Sr. had helped come to the United States in 1963 to attend high school, was by August 1988 an unmarried forty-four-year-old store clerk living in central Cambridge. Omar’s apartment at 48 Bishop Allen Drive was his twenty-seven-year-old nephew’s first destination when Barack exited the Massachusetts Turnpike upon arriving from Chicago. Omar had never completed high school, but his mundane work life had not kept him from developing keen political interests. “I am a Pan-Africanist,” he wrote in a letter to Ebony magazine, one who shared “the dreams of brothers Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X.” Barack had never met his uncle Omar, but Omar happily hosted him while Barack scoured the Boston Globe’s classified ads looking for a place of his own.

John “Jay” Holmes owned the handsome, almost century-old Queen Anne–style Langmaid Terrace apartment building at 359–365 Broadway in Somerville’s Winter Hill neighborhood. Harvard Law School was a twelve-minute, two-and-half-mile drive away, but for $700 a month a one-bedroom basement-level “garden” apartment there offered more private and spacious quarters, including a nice exposed-brick living room, than other rentals closer in. By the end of August, Barack was happily settled at 365 Broadway #B1, and on September 1, Harvard Law School (HLS)’s two-day registration and orientation for first-year students—“1Ls”—got under way on its multibuilding campus on the east side of Massachusetts Avenue, a short distance north of Harvard Square.

The entering class of 1991 numbered 548 students, selected from among seventy-one hundred applicants. Forty percent of the new class were women, and 22 percent were nonwhite, including fifty-seven African American students, of whom almost two-thirds were women. That was impressive diversity: the 2L and 3L classes had started with sixty and seventy-three African Americans, respectively. While the average age of the new 1Ls was twenty-three, with an overwhelming majority coming directly from their undergraduate studies, 5 percent of the class was over the age of thirty, including “many students who experienced the ‘real world’ before coming to law school,” according to the weekly Harvard Law Record. Word among the faculty was that “preferences for applicants who had taken time off, engaged in public works, or participated in other significant outside activities or experiences” had played a significant role in admissions decisions.

The school had an illustrious reputation but a deeply troubled internal culture. For three years, the faculty had been embroiled in toxic ideological warfare that had seen four junior faculty members denied permanent appointments, the first such tenure denials in seventeen years. That quartet was seen as “crits,” or proponents of “critical legal studies” (CLS), a left-wing school of thought that viewed legal rules and doctrines as inherently conservative rather than politically neutral. While several prominent crits, including CLS’s most erudite proponent, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Brazilian legal philosopher, were senior members of the Harvard law faculty, other full professors, including Robert C. Clark and David Rosenberg, were perceived as conservative “law and economics” devotees who were generally hostile to the work of crits.

James Vorenberg, dean of the law school since 1981, had announced his upcoming departure from that post in April 1988, just as tensions over a second issue of faculty composition—racial and gender diversity—were reaching a new peak as well. Seven years earlier, the roughly sixty-member Harvard law faculty had included just one tenured woman and a single tenured black male, who passed away in 1983. By 1988 there were five senior women, all white, and two tenured black men—Derrick Bell and Christopher Edley—with one more woman and three additional black men—Charles Ogletree, Randall Kennedy, and David Wilkins—all on the cusp of consideration for permanent appointments. In May 1988, the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) occupied Vorenberg’s office in a “study vigil” to protest the school’s failure to appoint additional minority faculty, with Professor Bell and legendary civil rights organizer Robert Moses addressing a student rally the next day.

Even with their healthy representation in each entering class, Harvard’s black law students felt a constant need to prove they were just as qualified as their white classmates to succeed at HLS. “Everything here says you can’t do it,” graduating BLSA president Verna Williams remarked in a fifty-page 1988 BLSA publication. “BLSA fights that negative attitude, and that builds you up.” The 1988 class had found BLSA in “disarray” upon their 1985 arrival and had worked to show that black students could attain leadership positions in multiple student organizations. By their 3L year, they had succeeded, with 1987–88 marking “the first time in HLS history that black law students, in significant numbers, had not only gotten involved in campus organizations outside of BLSA, but had done so with such success and capability that their peers … asked them to lead the organizations.”

But law students of all races were deeply unhappy with the institution’s culture. In the late 1980s “attending Harvard Law School was a miserable experience for the majority of its students,” one highly supportive alumnus later acknowledged, and a 1988 forum soliciting student input regarding the selection of Vorenberg’s successor instead focused on “the alienation students have felt from the law faculty,” the Harvard Crimson reported. “I don’t always feel that professors are here who can teach,” one 3L woman told the paper. “Law school seems to exist primarily for the professors.” Another 3L wrote in a subsequent memoir, “I didn’t know any of my law school professors,” and described how “the one thing that actually drew the student body together was a widespread disenchantment with our teachers.” He also recounted that although 70 percent of his classmates had arrived at Harvard expressing an interest in practicing public interest law, only six out of 474 actually accepted legal-services jobs after graduation.

Four years earlier a young sociologist, Robert Granfield, had begun questioning scores of Harvard law students to analyze the “complex ideological process that systematically channels students away from socially oriented work.” He concluded that “students come to believe that effective social progress occurs primarily through the use of elite positions and resources.” Graduates “feel that they have emerged with their altruism intact, while having actually been co-opted” into joining large corporate law firms as a result of their acculturation at what he called “a tremendously powerful co-optive institution.” The bottom line was that “employment in organizations designed principally to serve the corporate rich came to be seen as highly compatible with public service ideals.”

BLSA’s long, mid-1988 report included a four-page essay entitled “Minority and Women Law Professors: A Comparison of Teaching Styles,” written by a graduating 3L who had accepted a job at the Chicago office of Sidley & Austin, one of the country’s most prominent corporate law firms. Michelle Robinson had taken Criminal Law with Charles Ogletree and Family Law with Martha Minow, a young professor who had been awarded tenure in 1986 and whose father was one of Sidley & Austin’s best-known partners. Robinson briefly interviewed both Ogletree and Minow, as well as David Wilkins, because she saw each of them as highly atypical faculty members: “each one of these professors spends an enormous amount of time with students—particularly minority and women students,” she wrote. Robinson clearly admired Minow, writing that “sitting in her Family Law class is like sitting in the studio audience during a taping of the Phil Donahue Show.” Not all compliments are actually flattering, but it was David Wilkins, in just his second year of teaching at Harvard, who supplied the real gist of Robinson’s essay. “The problem here is that only about ten percent of the professors care enough about students to spend time with them,” he bluntly told her. “Consequently, this ten percent gets a disproportionate share of students to counsel.” He pointed out further that they bore that heavy ancillary burden while also striving to write the law review articles necessary for promotion to tenured full professor.

Like many of her fellow students, Robinson lamented the law faculty’s relative lack of “people who possess the enthusiasm, sensitivity and ingenuity necessary to bring excitement back into the classroom.” She also decried the school’s lack of interest in hiring a more diverse faculty and said it “merely reinforces racist and sexist stereotypes,” attitudes that also were manifest in “the rude statements and questions posed by students”—white students—“to Professors Wilkins and Ogletree.” But as Robinson’s acceptance of Sidley & Austin’s highly remunerative job offer underscored, another defining element of the law school’s culture was that the high cost of a Harvard education provided a powerful incentive for graduates to take the best-paying jobs available.

Several hundred graduating students had completed a Robert Granfield questionnaire that probed that subject, and a heavy majority acknowledged that “the necessity of repaying educational loans” had been a decisive factor in their own job decisions. With most graduates leaving Harvard saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, law students “are co-opted into futures of providing service for the corporate elite,” Granfield concluded. Verna Myers had arrived at the law school straight from her 1981–82 senior year as president of Columbia and Barnard’s Black Student Organization. “I went to Harvard expecting to change the world,” but in 1985, “I left Harvard thinking ‘How can I pay my loans?’ ”¹

The first day of Harvard’s fall 1988 registration for 1Ls featured a 1:00 P.M. financial aid session. Tuition for the year was $12,300, with total costs for a student living off-campus estimated at $22,450. That day or the next, the new students also received their course schedules for the fall semester. The entering class was divided into four numerically identified sections—I, II, III, and IV—of about 140 students apiece. Each section had five core first-year courses: Civil Procedure, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, and Property. Within each of those four sections, each student was also assigned to a thirteen-member “O Group”—O as in Orientation—which would then become their ungraded, fall semester one-afternoon-a-week Legal Methods class, taught by an upper-class student. Each O Group had a faculty mentor, and for Section III, to which Obama was assigned, one of the five substantive courses, Torts, would be divided into a trio of smaller, forty-five student classes. For Section III, Civil Procedure and Contracts would last the entire year, three hours a week. Torts and Criminal Law would meet five hours per week in the fall semester. In the spring, when 1Ls could choose a single elective from among half a dozen choices, Section III would have Property five hours per week, and the Legal Methods class would morph into a prolonged “moot court” exercise in which two-person teams briefed and argued faux court cases. One odd feature of Harvard’s first-year schedule was that final exams for the fall classes took place only in mid-January, well after the Christmas and New Year’s break.

The first classmates the new students met were their fellow members of the O Group, who introduced themselves alphabetically. Richard Cloobeck was a twenty-two-year-old Dartmouth graduate from Los Angeles. African American Eric Collins, from North Carolina, had just graduated from Princeton. Twenty-three-year-old UCLA graduate Diana Derycz had just finished a master’s degree at Stanford. Then came a trio of visibly older men. Rob Fisher had grown up on a farm in Charles County in southern Maryland before graduating from Duke in 1976 and completing a Ph.D. in economics there six years later. From 1982 until a few months earlier he had taught economics at the College of the Holy Cross in western Massachusetts. Mark Kozlowski, a 1980 graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, had spent the past eight years studying political theory at Columbia University and was about to submit his Ph.D. dissertation on the constitutional thought of American framer and president James Madison. When Barack Obama introduced himself, “the way he spoke was very, very memorable,” Richard Cloobeck recounted. “He was talking about black folks and white folks” and “what really, really struck me is that I got the impression he was neither.” Mark Kozlowski remembered Barack mentioning both Hawaii and Indonesia when he spoke. “I was immediately very impressed with Barack” and “I was immediately taken with the voice.” The trio of Fisher, Kozlowski, and Obama made Cloobeck realize “there was a big distinction between the older people and the younger people,” and Diana Derycz remembered similarly, thinking “how brainy people were” in this new northeastern environment.

After Obama was a twenty-two-year-old Tufts graduate. “I’m Jennifer Radding. I have no idea how I got in,” she said. She remembers that Barack was among those who laughed, and “he knew I was a bit of a jokester,” Jennifer explained. Jeff Richman had just graduated from the University of Michigan, and Sarah Leah Whitson was a brand-new graduate of UC Berkeley with family roots in the Middle East. The high-powered group featured strikingly diverse experiences. Diana Derycz had spent five years in Mexico as a child and was working part-time as a professional model. Fisher had studied in Australia for three years during and after graduate school, Barack had lived almost three years in Indonesia, and Whitson had spent summers with relatives in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.

O group instructor Scott Becker, a twenty-five-year-old 3L who was a graduate of the University of Illinois, found himself supervising a group of 1Ls some of whom—Rob, Mark, and Barack in particular—were older and more worldly-wise than he. The first day’s mandate was to conduct some sort of attorney-witness Q&A exercise, and when it was over, Barack immediately introduced himself to the obviously brilliant Rob Fisher, who was seven years his senior. “We instantly became friends,” Fisher recalled. Rob’s intellectual enthusiasm and energy belied his thirty-four years. In 1986, New York University Press had published his book The Logic of Economic Discovery: Neoclassical Economics and the Marginal Revolution. The book’s title purposely mirrored Karl Popper’s famous The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and the major figure in Fisher’s work was the late Hungarian philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, whose scholarly work in Popper’s empiricist tradition was vastly better known than his role as a hard-core Stalinist in Hungary’s post–World War II Communist Party. Fisher’s focus was what he termed “A Lakatosian Approach to Economics,” and his volume had garnered enthusiastically positive reviews in scholarly journals. “The book effectively demonstrates the applicability of the philosophy of science to the history of economics,” one reviewer wrote, adding that “the argument is crystal clear and largely persuasive.” A second observed that “the reason neoclassical economists like Lakatos so much is that his philosophy is intended fundamentally to explain the evolution of physics,” since “neoclassical economics wants desperately to be a social physics.”

Fisher remembered from the first day that Barack “recognized he was in a playground for ideas,” one where he could exercise “his love for intellectual argument.” It was a passion that Rob shared, and from that day forward the somewhat unlikely duo would become an inseparable pair whom scores of classmates recall as the closest of friends. Barack remembered his initial experience of Harvard Law School similarly. “I was excited about it. Here was an opportunity for me to read and reflect and study for as much as I wanted. That was my job,” and a much easier one than what he had confronted at the Developing Communities Project. “When I went back to law school, the idea of reading a book didn’t seem particularly tough to me.”

The four fall 1L courses gave Barack some large books to read, and he needed to read them with painstaking care. In Contracts, Professor Ian Macneil, a 1955 Harvard Law School graduate who was visiting for the year from Northwestern University, had assigned his own Contracts: Exchange Transactions and Relations, 2nd ed., which was more than thirteen hundred pages long. In Civil Procedure, the text for the year, Richard H. Field et al.’s Materials for a Basic Course in Civil Procedure, 5th ed., came in slightly shorter, at 1,275 pages. Section III’s fall semester of Civ Pro was taught by Professor David L. Shapiro, a 1957 summa cum laude Harvard Law graduate and former Supreme Court clerk, but in December Shapiro would become deputy solicitor general of the United States, and the course would be taken over for the spring semester by Stephen N. Subrin, a visiting professor from Northeastern University Law School.

In Criminal Law, Professor Richard D. Parker, a 1970 Harvard Law graduate and another former Supreme Court clerk, assigned Paul H. Robinson’s brand-new Fundamentals of Criminal Law, a mere 1,090 pages. And in Torts, Professor David Rosenberg, a 1967 graduate of NYU’s law school who had taught at Harvard since 1979, would use Page Keeton et al.’s Cases and Materials on Tort and Accident Law, which at 1,360 pages was the bulkiest of the four.²

After the long Labor Day weekend, 1L classes commenced on Tuesday morning, September 6. For Section III, their first class session was Contracts with Ian Macneil, whom the members of Barack’s O Group had already met for a brown-bag lunch in his role as their faculty mentor. Since Macneil was almost as new to Harvard as they were, the assignment had little practical value, but the Scottish Macneil—in private life he was the eminent forty-sixth chief of Clan Macneil—seemed like a nice man.

But in the classroom, Macneil’s use of the traditional Socratic method brought out an utterly different personal demeanor. Most members of Section III would remember their first class at Harvard Law School for the rest of their lives. They had been informed five days earlier, in the semester’s initial number of the weekly, mimeographed HLS Adviser newsletter, by both Macneil and David Shapiro, what to read in advance of Tuesday’s classes. Macneil’s reading included the preface to his casebook, in which he repeatedly used the Latin abbreviation “e.g.” and also stated his somewhat iconoclastic definition of the course’s core concept: “contract encompasses all human activities in which economic exchange is a significant factor—marriage as much as sales of goods.” That highly inclusive definition distinguished his text from others. “Thus the range of activities treated goes beyond those traditionally associated with the doctrinally structured first year contracts course.” Organized with an eye toward “functional patterns, rather than doctrinally,” the book “focuses on the negotiational and remedial processes that continuing exchange relationships generate.”

Ian Macneil began Tuesday’s 9:00 A.M. class by telling Section III’s 140 students that no matter where they had gone to college, no undergraduate education had taught them to read as carefully as they would have to in order to succeed at Harvard Law School. “For example, I bet you don’t know what the difference between i.e. and e.g. is,” he remarked while glancing at his seating chart and randomly calling upon Alicia Rubin, a 1987 graduate of Harvard College.

Rubin knew enough Latin to nail the answer cold: “i.e. stands for id est, that is, and e.g. is exempli gratia, for example,” she replied. “That really ticked him off,” she recalled, because Macneil had not anticipated an immediate correct response. “Well, Miss Rubin,” he said, “let’s see if you’ve done the reading for today. Can you define a contract?” Rubin “had not even bought my books yet,” and “so I fumbled around” trying to answer. Seated next to her was Michelle Jacobs, a 1988 Harvard College graduate who quickly realized that John Houseman’s fictional contracts professor in the 1973 film The Paper Chase was, at least in Ian Macneil’s classroom, no Hollywood exaggeration. “Oh my god! It really does happen!” Jacobs remembered thinking.

Jacobs knew that Macneil “had this bizarre definition of contract that was in our reading,” and “I had written it down, and I kept trying to give it to her,” but Rubin was focused only on Macneil. “Then he said something to the effect of ‘Don’t embarrass yourself further. Please leave the room, do the reading you were supposed to do, and then come back and see if you can take a better stab at it.’ ” David Attisani, a 1987 graduate of Williams College, watched the exchange and thought it “idiotic.” So did Eric Collins, the African American Princeton graduate who was in Obama’s O Group. He recalls thinking that “if this is how law school is, I’ve made a mistake.” Rubin said she rose, “borrowed somebody else’s textbook,” and headed for the door. Richard Cloobeck also remembered the scene. “It was a very, very powerful moment, and he was such an asshole.”

In the hallway, Rubin read through the preface of Macneil’s casebook. “It seemed like an eternity, but it probably was only ten or fifteen minutes.” She went “back into the room,” and “then he calls on me again.” Rubin tried “to stumble through some kind of response,” but Macneil “picked me apart again.” She felt “absolutely mortified and miserable,” but finally the class ended. “It was just a horrible first day of class,” Rubin recalled, but a few minutes later, in a nearby hallway, an older student she did not know came up to her. “He put his hand on my shoulder and was like ‘You know, you did a really nice job.’ ” He introduced himself as Barack Obama. “He was giving me this little pep talk,” and Ali Rubin was hugely appreciative. Barack’s comments were “really nice.”

David Shapiro’s first session of Civ Pro featured a discussion of Goldberg v. Kelly, a 1970 U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting the due process rights of welfare recipients. Richard Parker’s Crim Law and David Rosenberg’s Torts also started the semester without incident, but each morning Section III’s Contracts class met with Macneil, the room was riven with tension as the students waited to see whom he would call upon next. “If someone’s terrified, they’re not learning very well,” recounts Amy Christian, a magna cum laude 1988 graduate of Georgetown University who later became a law professor herself. She “couldn’t stand” Macneil’s classroom style, and most of her classmates soon felt likewise.

Making things worse, Macneil demanded that students initial an attendance roster each morning to demonstrate who was present. American Bar Association accreditation standards for law schools mandated that students actually attend most of their classes, but in 1988 the majority of law professors, at Harvard and elsewhere, paid little attention to this requirement. Macneil’s policy, followed by angry warnings when it was discovered that some people were signing in for absent classmates, roiled Section III even further. “People felt it was juvenile,” Lisa Hay, a 1985 summa cum laude Yale graduate, recalled. The practice was “really juvenile for a professional school,” agreed Martin Siegel, a 1988 highest honors graduate of the University of Texas.

“Relations between Macneil and the class broke down very severely very quickly,” Mark Kozlowski explained. In class Macneil came across as “a very angry person,” remembered Morris Ratner, who had just graduated with distinction from Stanford. The “toxic atmosphere” made the course “a disaster,” the exact same word that David Troutt, a biracial African American 1986 graduate of Stanford, used when recalling the day Macneil “cursed at me.” Aside from Macneil’s attendance policy, there was also the burden of “how demanding he was in terms of the volume of material that you had to cover and also because of how ruthless and unforgiving he was of people who weren’t prepared,” explained Paolo Di Rosa, a 1987 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College. “He really humiliated people who weren’t prepared.” Michelle Jacobs came to believe that Macneil “liked humiliating people.” Jennifer Radding remembered the day Macneil called on her about secured transactions. “I’ll never forget it—obviously I’m still traumatized all these years later,” she joked equivocally. Greg Sater, like Ratner a 1988 Stanford graduate with distinction, felt Macneil was “really verbally abusive to people,” and Sarah Leah Whitson found him “so angry and critical and disparaging of students.” Di Rosa used the same adjective as Sater—“abusive”—to characterize Macneil, who was “just a monster,” and Di Rosa agreed with Amy Christian that the result was “more fear than respect.”

Rob Fisher was the only student who had spent six years at the front of a college classroom, but he fully shared his classmates’ view that Macneil was “a horrible professor” and Contracts “was the most painful course.” Fisher and Mark Kozlowski, also older, both quickly grasped that Macneil’s idiosyncratic approach was profoundly simplistic. “He had one idea,” Fisher recalled, “that contracts are relationships.” Kozlowski was even more dismissive, viewing Macneil’s focus as “a pointless effort to apply absolutely standard social science rhetoric to contracts.” Even worse, “he spent a lot of time on his theory and not a great deal of time on learning contracts,” which quickly led many in Section III to believe they were being shortchanged relative to friends in other sections. “There was a sense that Section III was not learning contracts at the same level as the other students and learning the doctrine,” recalled Tim Driscoll, a 1988 summa cum laude graduate of Hofstra University. “People just really thought that they were not learning contracts law, and they were getting cheated,” agreed Gina Torielli, an older student who had graduated from Michigan State with high honors.

Jackie Fuchs, a 1988 summa cum laude graduate of UCLA who before college played bass guitar alongside Joan Jett in the Runaways, agreed that Macneil was “very hard to get along with,” but she felt he simply “did not know how to relate to people in their twenties.” Kozlowski was less charitable. Not only was Macneil “extremely antagonistic in class,” he repeatedly “would simply insult people to their face,” and not just young women like Ali Rubin. Mark remembered a conservative white male politely saying he did not understand a question, yet Macneil responded, “It’s a point that would be obvious to any intelligent person. It’s not obvious to you.” Shannon Schmoyer, who had graduated summa cum laude and first in her 1987 class at the University of Oklahoma, summed up Section III’s view of Ian Macneil: “he was an embarrassment to Harvard Law School.”³

Not all of Barack’s time and energy during the fall semester’s first weeks were devoted to his casebooks and class time. The law school’s Hemenway gym was indisputably a dump—a word that a dozen alumni used for the facility—but its convenient location made finding pickup basketball games easy, as long as yoga classes or volleyball matches were not taking place. Only a few hours after reassuring Ali Rubin how well she had coped with Macneil’s onslaught, Barack late that afternoon went to Hemenway and found a group that included twenty-two-year-old African American 1L Frank Harper, a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, and four African American 2Ls: Kevin Little, Leon Bechet, Frank Cooper, and Kenny Smith. African American 1L David Hill, a 1986 high honors graduate of Wesleyan University, soon joined the regular late-afternoon mix.

When a student intramurals league got started shortly into the semester, a half-dozen of the black Hemenway regulars, including Barack, came together briefly on a team they called BOAM: Brothers on a Mission. “We weren’t very good,” remembered Kevin Little, perhaps HLS’s top basketball devotee. All during that 1L year, Barack spent a good deal of time on the basketball court, but “he didn’t want to hang out afterwards,” Leon Bechet recalled. “It seemed like he always had a schedule … like he had a mission and he had a purpose.”

With the 1991, 1990, and 1989 classes together, Harvard had more than 150 black law students on campus that fall, and the BLSA chapter seemed to have as much energy as their 1988 graduating class. BLSA scheduled its own orientation event for 1Ls soon after their arrival on campus. David Hill remembered how “Barack is holding court” and other new students “thought he was not a 1L” as they listened to him. “People were very surprised that this guy was a 1L simply because of how he was handling himself.” An evening or two earlier, standing in the checkout line at the Star Market in Porter Square, just up from the law school, Barack had introduced himself to an African American woman he recognized from the first day’s financial aid orientation session. “I think we’re both at Harvard,” he said to Cassandra “Sandy” Butts, a 1987 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Butts was in Section I, but “we certainly bonded over some of our challenges in the financial aid office,” and she, like Rob Fisher, became a close friend of Barack’s in their first days at Harvard.

Butts was with Obama and David Hill at that BLSA gathering when 3L Sheryll Cashin approached. Cashin too recalled other students listening as Barack spoke. “Within a couple of minutes, all of the people around were just hanging on his every word.” Barack was “dressed kind of shabbily,” and “I remember him talking about community organizing.” Also listening was one of the youngest 1Ls, Christine Lee, a 1988 Oberlin College graduate who was still a few days shy of her twenty-first birthday. Lee had spent her early childhood in Paris, but when she was ten, her white mother left her alcoholic African American father and took her to live in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, where she grew up as the black daughter of a white single mother. From Christine’s youthful perspective, Barack sounded “kind of full of himself,” because “he acted like he’d come from a whole life of work in the trenches rather than just a little stint after college.” Barack “seemed pretentious,” and “I immediately did not like him.”

Barack remembered listening to and first meeting Derrick Bell at that BLSA orientation, but he was not immediately drawn to any of the five African American men on the law faculty. Even though Charles Ogletree was an untenured visiting professor, the 1978 Harvard Law graduate was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the school’s black law students, and by mid-September, Ogletree had begun convening the first of four fall semester “Saturday School” sessions during which he hoped to reassure black 1Ls that they should not allow self-doubts to prevent them from succeeding at Harvard Law School. Derrick Bell and David Wilkins joined Ogletree, as did Charles Nesson, a white 1963 summa cum laude Harvard Law graduate who had worked in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division before joining the Harvard faculty. Ogletree was at pains to stress that the Saturday-morning sessions were “not a remedial course,” and BLSA leaders, like Ogletree, used the gatherings to encourage black 1Ls to become active in and seek out leadership roles in a variety of student organizations. About forty students attended the initial meeting, and Obama’s black classmates remember that he rarely if ever attended “Saturday School.”⁴

By mid-September, something else occurred in Barack’s life that he did not mention to any of his new law school friends. Sheila Jager was staying with him at his Somerville apartment. Her Fulbright fellowship was for her to spend twelve months doing her dissertation fieldwork at Seoul National University in South Korea. After Barack left for Harvard, Sheila had intended to leave Chicago in mid-September and go to Seoul. But Barack wrote to her soon after his arrival in Cambridge, and after some phone calls, Sheila agreed to fly to Boston before going to South Korea.

“Why did I end up with him for a month in his Somerville apartment before leaving for Korea?” Sheila asked herself after recounting how she had refused to accompany Barack to Harvard. “I never said that I wouldn’t visit him,” she remembered, and she also recalled how her parents, who were then in Japan, were “really angry with me” when they learned she was staying with Barack and would not arrive in Seoul until after they had left the Far East.

Barack and Sheila’s weeks together in the private basement apartment became a replay of their final months in Chicago before Barack’s trip to Europe and Kenya. “I felt smothered by Barack, by his neediness to be the center of my world, by his sheer overpowering presence, and by the isolation I felt because we were always alone,” Sheila recalled. Barack recounted what he most liked about his new life as a law student. “I do remember Barack telling me about Rob, although we never met. He described him, as I recall, as ‘a bear of a man’ and talked about him with great warmth, as a kind of older brother…. He said the two of them were the smartest people in their class at Harvard and ran rings around everybody else.” Many of Rob and Barack’s Section III colleagues were coming to share that characterization as the fall semester progressed, but after a month in Barack’s apartment, Sheila was indeed ready to leave for Korea.

“He was like a huge flame that sucked up all the oxygen, and toward the end of our relationship, I felt breathless, exhausted really. I remember getting off the plane in Seoul and feeling like I could breathe again.” Deep down, Sheila’s feelings for Barack remained the same as in Chicago. “I knew at that point that the relationship could not work in the long term even though I loved him very deeply. He, of course, realized this as well. When I left for Korea, I felt as if I had abandoned him, although the split was completely mutual.”

But even when Barack drove Sheila to Logan Airport, their relationship had not seen its true end.⁵

As September turned to October for the 1L students in Section III, their distaste for Ian Macneil gave way to gallows humor as they realized they could do nothing to alter their fate. The section took on the mordant nickname of “the Gulag.” Lisa Hay, who had worked for Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis’s campaign before beginning her 1L year, began anonymously producing a weekly mimeographed newsletter chronicling life in Section III entitled Three Speech. It recorded odd or humorous statements from their reading and from classroom comments. Macneil, of course, was a prime target. One headline was: “You Make the Call: Fact? or Fiction?,” followed by a quotation from Macneil’s Contracts casebook: “Habit, custom and education develop a sense of obligation to preserve one’s credit rating not altogether different from that Victorian maidens felt respecting their virginity.”

Hay quoted Macneil’s maladroit attempts at classroom humor that often backfired. For example: “The sexual relation is a good one for you to think about—in the context of this course, I mean.” Or when Macneil asked, “Give me an example of a voluntary exchange,” Richard Cloobeck, one of Section III’s best provocateurs, volunteered, “Having sex with your girlfriend,” to which Macneil replied, “Give me an easier one.” The next week, when the concept of inadequacy arose, Macneil bluntly asked one student, “Does your girlfriend ever say you are inadequate?” and a few days later, he insultingly told another, “Maybe you don’t have the skills to be a law student.”

When Hay crafted a top-ten list of reasons for not doing Macneil’s assigned readings, entries included “slept through class,” “was laughing too hard at footnotes to read the text,” and a joke about Macneil’s almost daily references to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Most pointed of all was “Proportionality: Contracts homework out of proportion with length and value of class.” In October, Hay reported a joking exchange between two classmates: “ ‘If I learned I only had a week to live, I’d want to spend all my time with Macneil.’ ‘Why’s that?’ ‘Because he makes every minute seem like a year!’ ”

With the November presidential election, pitting Massachusetts governor Dukakis against the Republican nominee, Vice President George Bush, drawing near, Barack registered to vote on October 4. Starting the next day, he also began racking up a remarkable run of thirteen parking tickets over the next four weeks on his rusty yellow Toyota, with most of them happening on Mass Avenue just west of the law school. On campus, student politics were roiled when the conservative Federalist Society chapter objected to the student government’s reserving two committee seats for the Coalition for Diversity. Jesse Jackson addressed a pro-diversity rally of twelve hundred people, and Derrick Bell renewed his calls for greater minority representation on the law faculty.

David Shapiro’s Civ Pro course was Section III’s most vanilla class, but most students thought Shapiro was an excellent, witty teacher. Classmates and Shapiro recall Obama speaking only irregularly in Civ Pro, but they do remember him as one of the most talkative voices in Richard Parker’s Crim Law classroom. Parker had “a class discussion” style that stood in contrast to Macneil’s classic Socratic method, recalls Kenneth Mack, one of Section III’s other African American men. Mack thought Barack was a standout presence from the first week of class. “He was a striking figure,” Mack said. “He spoke very well, and very eloquently,” and seemed “older and wiser than the three years that separated our birth dates…. It seemed like I was twenty-four, and Barack was thirty-four,” like Rob Fisher. “He and Rob seemed like they were the same age.” Shannon Schmoyer agreed: Barack “just seemed so much more mature” than most other 1Ls.

Parker was an entertaining teacher, and having Peter Larrowe, a former police officer, in the class sometimes added a bracing dose of reality to discussions. Several students recalled Parker saying, “If you’re going to a protest, always take your toothbrush,” and Lisa Hay’s Three Speech recorded one exchange after Larrowe mentioned his background to Parker: “ ‘Does everyone know that you were a police officer?’ ‘They do now…. No more undercover work,’ ” Larrowe joked. Fisher also vividly remembered Parker querying students about their own experiences with police officers and one attractive woman describing how she was patted down outside a bar. “How did that make you feel?” Parker asked. “Oh, it was kind of nice,” she replied as the entire class erupted in laughter.

Sarah Leah Whitson remembered Obama once making some real-world rather than doctrinal point in a colloquy with Parker, and Richard Cloobeck recalled a similar scene where Barack “spoke from the black perspective in Crim class because something had happened to him where he’d experienced racial discrimination in profiling, and it was very personal.” Sherry Colb, valedictorian of Columbia’s 1988 graduating class and Section III’s most loquacious female voice, remembered that when the subject of acquaintance rape came up in class, Barack expressed displeasure with what others had said. “ ‘I don’t even understand why we’re debating this. Why is silence enough? Why aren’t people looking for “yes”?’ ” Sherry recalled Barack asking. “I think the women in the class really appreciated that because there were other males in the class who took a more reactionary position.”

Sima Sarrafan, an Iranian American honors graduate of Vassar College, realized that Obama “had a more pragmatic view of the law” than most classmates or professors. Roger Boord, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of the University of Virginia, remembered Barack as “this voice of authority … his voice was like Walter Cronkite.” But especially in Parker’s class, Barack, David Troutt, and Sherry Colb spoke up so regularly that it generated irritation and derision from some fellow students. Most Section III students spoke only when asked to. “The last thing I ever wanted would be to be called upon,” Greg Sater explained. “Most of my friends were the same way, and we would never in a million years ever raise our hand.”

In stark contrast, Section III’s most self-confident voices, or “gunners,” in longtime law student parlance, raised their hands almost every day in participatory classes like Richard Parker’s. Dozens of Obama’s classmates remember him consistently waiting until a discussion’s latter part before he chimed in, with comments that he thought synthesized what others had said. “He never really took a very strong, argumentative position,” Ali Rubin recalled. Dozens laughingly recalled his insistent usage of the word “folks” as well as his regular introductory refrain of “It’s my sense” or “My sense is,” phrases that DCP members remembered hearing regularly during his time in Chicago. Barack “particularly loved to engage with Professor Parker,” Haverford College graduate Lisa Paget recalled. She has a “vivid” memory of Barack remarking, “Professor Parker, I think what the folks here are trying to say is” so as “to synthesize what other people were saying.” Barack “clearly liked to speak,” but “sometimes people got frustrated because they didn’t feel like they needed him” to speak for them. “ ‘Say what your own thinking is, don’t tell him what we’re thinking!’ ”

Decades later, particularly for classmates who had become jurists or prominent attorneys, recollections of just how intensely irritating Obama’s classroom performance had been were burnished with good humor. But even though he was always prepared, always articulate, and always on target, many fellow students tired of Obama’s need to orate. Barack “spoke in complete paragraphs,” Jennifer Radding recalled, but “he often got hissed by us because sometimes we would all make comments” and then “he would raise his hand and say ‘I think what my colleagues are trying to say if I might sum up,’ and we’d be like ‘We can speak for ourselves—shut the fuck up!’ ” Radding thought Obama was “a formal person, reserved” but “always friendly.” Yet “I’m not sure he related to women as well on a colleague basis” as he did with older male friends like Rob, Mark Kozlowski, and Dan Rabinovitz, a former community organizer interested in politics. Jennifer remembered Barack asking Rob and Dan substantive questions, and “then he’d ask me did I party over the weekend.” One day “I called him on it, and I just said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re someone who’s so liberal, and so women’s rights, and you talk to women like they’re not on the same level.’ It horrified him to hear that,” and “I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.”

The joking about Obama’s classroom performance intensified as the fall semester progressed. One classmate, Jerry Sorkin, christened him “The Great Obama” because “he had kind of a superior attitude,” Sorkin’s friend David Attisani remembered. “Barack would start a lot of his speeches with the words ‘My sense is,’ and Jerry would walk around kind of stroking his chin saying ‘My sense is.’ ” Gina Torielli recalled that when Obama or especially Sherry Colb raised their hands to speak, more than a few of the younger men would “take out their watches to start timing how long” they talked. In time it became a competitive game, one played at many law schools over multiple generations, and often called “turkey bingo,” in which irritated classmates wager a few dollars on how long different gunners would exchange comments with the professor. Section III named its contest “The Obamanometer,” Greg Sater recalled, for it measured “how long he could talk.” But Sater explained how there “was a great feeling of relief to all of us whenever he would raise his hand because that would take time off the clock and would lower the chances of us being called upon.”

No one questioned the value of what Barack, Sherry, or David Troutt had to say, but much of Section III got tired of hearing the same voices day after day. With Barack, Greg said, “we were envious of him in many ways because of his intellect,” self-confidence, and poise, but that did not stop the Obamanometer. “We’d kind of look at each other and tap our watch,” he recalled. “You might raise five fingers,” predicting that long a disquisition, “and then your buddy might raise seven.” Jackie Fuchs remembered the label a little differently, explaining that students would “judge how pretentious someone’s remarks are in class by how high they rank on the Obamanometer.”⁶

Criminal Law was the course in which Barack “pontificated”—as Jackie called it—the most, but the class and professor that Barack and Rob found the most intellectually stimulating was Torts, with David Rosenberg. With only one-third of Section III’s students in that subsection, it was more intimate than Contracts, Civ Pro, or Crim, and the forty-five students responded enthusiastically to Rosenberg’s high-energy, in-your-face style and tough-minded libertarian economics. Everyone remembered Rosenberg’s invitation to a 6:30 A.M. law library tour, when he would discuss the practicalities of thorough legal research. Amy Christian, Richard Cloobeck, Diana Derycz, and Barack were among the half dozen or so students who showed up, and Three Speech recounted Rosenberg insisting during it, “I am not a masochist.”

David Attisani “loved” Rosenberg’s class. “He was my most useful professor by a wide margin,” and Rosenberg also held a volleyball clinic and took a large group of students out to dinner. Richard Cloobeck agreed that Rosenberg was “the most practical and realistic and effective” of Section III’s professors. He also was often the most entertaining. Mark Kozlowski remembered Rosenberg asserting that Harvard-trained lawyers taking legal-services jobs was the equivalent of MIT engineering graduates becoming appliance repairmen. Three Speech captured an exchange in which one student asked Rosenberg if a passage in one case opinion was dicta, or beside the point; Rosenberg responded, “No! That’s crap!”

Kozlowski and Cloobeck remembered how captivated Fisher and Obama were with Rosenberg, and Ali Rubin thought that “from the beginning Rosenberg treated Rob and Barack differently” than other students. Cloobeck believed Obama spoke just as much in Torts as he did in Crim, demonstrating to all how “incredibly, intensely smart and thoughtful” he was, even relative to classmates who had graduated at the top of their classes from the nation’s best colleges and universities. Obama was “intellectually curious” and “sincere in his academic passion,” Cloobeck thought, but he also seemed “extremely arrogant, very conceited.” Yet he admitted that Barack and Rob spoke “at a level that was just beyond my comprehension.”

David Rosenberg remembered Barack as “one of the most serious students I’ve ever encountered.” Rosenberg’s approach to Torts involved “applying social and natural science to social problems” in a heavily economic, functionalist manner. He recalls that “Obama and Fisher were determined to figure out what was going on, absolutely determined.” The two came by his office “almost twice or three times a week, not to talk about the course in ways that would translate into a better grade, but to talk about the actual problems that I was raising and the approach.” Rob and Barack were always together—“you couldn’t separate them,” Rosenberg explains—but “they weren’t a duo in their mind-sets,” and “it didn’t seem like one was dependent on the other. They were quite independent,” and always raising “social policy questions” when they came by. Rosenberg remembered that in class, Obama “asked good questions, he fought through hard problems. I thought he was going to be a top academic.”

Rob remembered that “Barack was very active” in Torts and “loved that class.” Rosenberg “met argument with argument, and valued creativity,” and “Barack and I just had a great time in that class. We were constantly arguing and talking and enjoying it and going to visit Rosenberg,” and Torts overall was “an absolute blast.” Rosenberg “had this intense intellectual passion” and a “creative style of lawyering that greatly appealed to us both.” Rob believes that “Rosenberg had a vastly bigger influence on Barack’s and my thinking about law” than their other 1L instructors combined.

Four years earlier, Rosenberg had published a major article in the Harvard Law Review calling for a restructuring of tort litigation in mass exposure cases like asbestos through the courts’ use of “aggregative procedural and remedial techniques,” an argument he revisited in a shorter 1986 HLR essay. In fall 1988, Rosenberg was writing an additional commentary, calling for “collective processing” and comprehensive settlements in mass tort cases rather than “legislative insurance schemes.” He was already so impressed by Rob and Barack that he sought their input on his draft manuscript. When it was published in May 1989, the first page included thanks to Rob and Barack for their “substantive criticism and editorial advice,” a remarkable acknowledgment for a Harvard law professor to bestow upon two 1L students.⁷

Amy Christian remembered a day in Torts when “one of Barack’s two front teeth was broken diagonally so that like half the tooth was gone,” a casualty from the previous afternoon’s basketball game, he told her. “A couple of classes later he came in, and his tooth looked totally normal.” Kenny Smith, a 2L, remembered Barack as “a good player,” but two recollections of Obama from among the wider population of classmates who went up against him either in intramural matchups or the almost daily pickup games were his penchant for “trash talk” insults to opposing players and his tendency to call “baby” fouls in self-refereed games. Barack “was cocky as a basketball player, he was not as a regular person,” 1L Brad Wiegmann thought. Martin Siegel recalled “being in a game with him where he called a foul” and “he just headed to the other end of the court.” Oftentimes, “being a law school, if people called fouls there was a tendency to have that devolve into a crazy argument.” Not so with Obama. In “a sign of his status,” everyone “followed him without objection. It was as if he had said it, and therefore it was so.”

Greg Sater had formed a volleyball league, and their court time was just after basketball, but the basketball players would refuse to give up the floor. “They would always give me shit,” Sater recalled, and then Barack would “sweet-talk me into giving them an extra few minutes, always.” He was “very disarming” and “very good at defusing situations and being a peacemaker.” Rob Fisher had similar memories from pickup basketball games, but they spent far more time studying than on the basketball court.

The press of coursework led Barack to give up on the irregular journal he had kept ever since his first year in New York, and he and Rob often studied at his Somerville apartment rather than in Harvard’s law library. Rob remembers that Barack was very proud of “three Filipino gun cases,” big long wooden boxes he had bought to serve as bookshelves, but otherwise the “apartment was very sparse,” with “a little TV,” some “spare furniture,” and overall an “ascetic” feeling. “He and I would sit around his apartment,” Rob recalled, “and just bang ideas back and forth for hours.”

Rob appreciated that Barack was “very much a synthetic thinker,” just as other classmates had sensed from his many summary expositions, and Rob realized as well that virtually everyone around them “recognized from the start” that Barack was “exceptional.” Rob understood that Barack’s time in Chicago had been “an extraordinary experience for him,” and although Rob has no memory of any such conversation, one of his closest friends vividly remembers a phone call early in Rob’s time at Harvard in which Rob said he had just met the first African American president of the United States.

“Barack and I both looked at law school as an intellectual playground, a place to develop ideas, to have fun with ideas,” Rob explained. “There is no question, when he was in law school, his path in his mind was to be a politician. That is where he was going, and that was crystal clear from day one of law school,” along with definitely returning to Chicago upon graduation. During their conversations, Rob learned that “Barack recognized he had exceptional talents, and that that was a gift from God, that was something special.” Barack “felt a great moral obligation to use” his “special gifts” to “help people … and that was very palpable, very real, and very deep.” Just as Sheila Jager had heard Barack speak about his destiny, Rob too understood that Barack had a sense of himself that was rooted in his experiences in Roseland. “The way he described it to me,” Rob recalled, during “long deep conversations … he pictured an elderly African American woman sitting on a porch and just saying to him, ‘Barack, you’ve got special gifts. You need to use them for people.’ That was a very deep-seated belief. There’s no question about that,” even in the fall of 1988. Rob also knew that Barack’s identification as black “was a choice,” and that “making choices about identity did limit personal choices, and that pained him.”

Barack “spent so much time together” with Cassandra “Sandy” Butts that a mutual friend explained how “everybody thought they were dating, even though I don’t think that was ever the case.” As Jackie Fuchs forthrightly put it, voicing a perception widely shared among female classmates, Barack “gave off zero sexuality…. He came off as completely asexual.” His relationship with Sandy, who was four years younger and whose parents had divorced before she was a year old, had an older brother–younger sister closeness.

“When I first met Barack, I thought he was this black guy from the Midwest, and he did not volunteer his background, other than coming from Chicago,” Cassandra explained. “I didn’t know that Barack’s mother was white until a couple of weeks into knowing him. It wasn’t something that he volunteered.” Sandy was interested in Africa and had visited Zimbabwe and Botswana as an undergraduate, and only after Barack mentioned his trip to Kenya did his family story emerge: “My mother is white.” Like Rob, Sandy also soon realized that Barack’s years in Chicago had been “the most formative” of his life, and “he talked about how powerful the position of mayor of Chicago was,” just as he had told Mike Kruglik and Bruce Orenstein months earlier. Barack “certainly saw in Harold Washington a model,” one who was “incredibly influential,” and “his ambition was to eventually run for mayor.” In Cassandra’s memory there was no question Barack “wanted to be mayor of Chicago, and that was all he talked about as far as holding office…. He only talked about being mayor, because he felt that is really where you have an impact. That’s where you could really make a difference in the lives of those people he had spent those years organizing.” She remembered too that “Barack used to say that one of his favorite sayings of the civil rights movement was ‘If you cannot bear the cross, you can’t wear the crown,’ ” a rough approximation of Martin Luther King’s January 17, 1963, statement—“The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear”—that was featured in the epigraph of the King biography that had been published midway through Barack’s time in Chicago.

Cassandra believed Barack’s intellectual seriousness made him “a bit of a geek in law school,” but his Chicago experiences gave him a real-world grounding most of his younger classmates lacked. She remembered a 1L discussion among black students about whether the preferred label should be “black” or “African American.” “Barack listens to all of this, and near the end … he basically makes the point that it was kind of this false choice, that whether we’re called ‘African Americans’ or ‘black,’ it really doesn’t matter, what matters is what we’re doing to help the people who are in communities that don’t have the luxury of having this debate.” Cassandra thought of Barack as “African and American,” with “a sense of direction and focus” that distinguished him. Compared to his younger classmates, Barack seemed “incredibly mature,” with a “very calm” demeanor, and Cassandra thought “Barack was as fully formed as a person could be at that point in his life.”

An informal study group emerged that included David Troutt, Gina Torielli, and Barack. They met sometimes at the BLSA office or at Torielli’s apartment. On one occasion, when Barack was outside smoking, Gina worried that “my landlord was going to call the police” after seeing a black man on the front porch. On another, when everyone was saying what their dream job was, Barack “said he wanted to be governor of Illinois.” Still, most of Barack’s study time was spent with Rob, and when the law school’s 1989 Yearbook appeared some months later, an early page featured an uncaptioned photo of Barack sprawled on a couch listening as a smiling Rob spoke while holding a loose-leaf notebook. “When I think of those two that year,” Gina Torielli explained, that picture “is how I remember often finding them.” The photo captured the ring on Barack’s left index finger that he had worn ever since his first year at Oxy. Rob remembered precisely when the picture was taken. “I was explaining macroeconomics to Barack, and … we also had an extended discussion about the national debt in that session and how and whether it mattered.” It was no accident that Cassandra thought Barack something of a geek, or that virtually everyone in Section III looked up to Rob and Barack as the smartest minds in their midst.

Barack was more forthcoming with Rob than with anyone else at Harvard, indeed with anyone other than Sheila and Lena. Even though Barack “never mentioned mayoral politics” and never said anything “that would suggest to me that he had his sights on mayoral politics,” it was clear “he was just extremely politically ambitious” and “wanted to go as far as he could. There was no doubt in my mind he was thinking presidency” and “he shared that with me at the time.”

Obama’s classmates could see that too. We “knew he’d be in politics. That was obvious right from the start,” Sherry Colb explained, and Lisa Paget agreed that Barack “was clearly going to be a politician.” David Attisani thought that Harvard’s classrooms were “something of a rehearsal for him for public life,” that “he was getting himself ready” and seemed to be “self-consciously grooming himself for … some kind of public life.” In retrospect, Jackie Fuchs thought Barack “had already decided that he was a future president,” and wondered if his self-transformation mirrored that of her past bandmate, Joan Jett. “I’m sure Barack as a child was perfectly ordinary, just like Joan was. Until the moment he decided that he was a star.” Fuchs was not enamored of the 1988 Barack—“in law school the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up”—but among the 1Ls who socialized together, David Troutt believed there was “none more careful, more guarded about his personal life than Barack.” David Attisani likewise viewed Barack as “a very private guy” who was “quite cautious about where he appeared socially.”

One Thursday evening, several young members of Section III, including Scott Sherman, a 1988 highest honors graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, decided to head down to Harvard Square to drink. Seeing Obama studying nearby, Sherman invited him to join the group, but Barack demurred. “No, you young guys go on down and have fun. I have work to do here,” and Barack’s comment left Sherman “feeling like a sophomoric frat boy. He was serious” and “he was not wasting his time at the law school,” Sherman recalled. “He was there for a reason,” and there was no gainsaying the five-year age gap between Barack and most of his fellow students.

Years later, classmates pictured how Barack appeared back then. “He always wore the same ugly leather jacket,” Jennifer Radding said, and everyone remembered seeing him smoking outside Harkness Commons—“the Hark”—or, during the winter, in a basement smoking room that was one of the few authorized locations after a Cambridge antismoking ordinance had taken effect eighteen months earlier. “He really did smoke a lot,” Mark Kozlowski recalled, and sometimes in the basement, Barack talked with Kenyan LL.M. student Maina Kiai, who also had arrived that fall. Kiai remembered him “always asking questions about Kenya and Africa,” and “we talked a great deal about poverty in the USA.” Diana Derycz also recalled Barack as a “big smoker” who was “outside smoking” before classes even in winter. Sarah Leah Whitson believed that by 1988 at Harvard Law smoking was a symbolically transgressive act that set one apart from the student mainstream. Rob Fisher thought that Barack “enjoyed it,” and Lisa Paget remembered that when Barack was “walking on campus in his leather jacket with his typical cigarette in his hand, he had swagger.”

Barack was also among several dozen 1Ls who signed up to do scut work—“sub-citing,” as in substantive citation checking—for the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, one of the law school’s student-run journals that welcomed 1L participation. At the end of October, Barack’s sister Maya, who was a freshman at Barnard College in Manhattan, came up for a weekend, including a Halloween-evening dinner party at Barack’s apartment for which ten or so people were encouraged to come in costume. Rob and Barack’s 1L friend Dan Rabinovitz and his buddy Thom Thacker came wearing whale outfits inspired by the freeing that week of two creatures that had been trapped in the ice off Point Barrow, Alaska.

“I remember from early on thinking that Barack was the single most impressive individual I’d ever met,” Rabinovitz recalled, and that his Somerville apartment “seemed incredibly hip.” Barack had “made it a great place to live,” and his taste for Miles Davis and similar musicians was evident from “the wonderful jazz playing in the background.” Dan had also been an organizer, and he agreed with Barack “that to really deal with the fundamental issues in people’s lives, you needed to engage the political system.” Dan too remembers how Barack “made clear absolutely it was his intention to go back to Chicago and to be involved politically.” Thom Thacker vividly recalls that Halloween evening, perhaps because Barack “possessed a magnetic charm” or more likely because Maya was now “drop-dead gorgeous.” But either that evening or a few days later, Thom would recount how “I remember Dan remarking to me that he thought Barack would be president of the United States one day.”

On November 8, 1988, George Bush handily defeated Michael Dukakis to keep the presidency in Republican hands. “Dukakis’s loss was a major loss, and we were feeling it,” David Troutt recalled, but Mark Kozlowski remembers David Rosenberg beginning Wednesday’s Torts class with a caustic quip about the Supreme Court aspirations of one of his favorite colleagues: “Larry Tribe can unpack!” Rosenberg’s respect and affection for Rob and Barack was now expressing itself in a different way, because when their favorite NBA team, the Chicago Bulls—“We were both big Michael Jordan fans,” Rob says—was in Boston that night to play the Celtics, Rosenberg gave them “like second row” tickets so they could watch an “awesome” 110–104 Bulls victory in which Jordan scored fifty-two points.⁸

By early November, Rob, Barack, and Mark Kozlowski had agreed to work together on the upcoming spring semester Ames Moot Court exercise, and they also enlisted Lisa Hertzer, another member of their small Legal Methods class and a 1988 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford. The Legal Methods course had proven more daunting for 3L instructor Scott Becker than for most of the 1Ls. “Barack was so far ahead of the curve intellectually,” Becker remembered, that often sessions featured the “hyper-ambitious” Obama explaining, “I think this is what Scott means by that,” although never in a way that embarrassed Becker.

Barack and Rob were also beginning to think about summer jobs for 1989, and Barack wanted to return to Chicago. Barack’s old friend Beenu Mahmood, who had welcomed him there in 1985 while he was a summer associate at Sidley & Austin, was now in his third year as a lawyer in Sidley’s New York office, and “I suggested that he seriously look at Sidley,” Beenu remembers. Barack had kept in regular touch with Beenu, who believed by 1988 that “Barack was the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity.”

Sidley actively sought out top 1Ls, and Beenu recalls speaking with Sidley managing partner Thomas A. Cole about Barack. Well before Christmas, his résumé arrived at Sidley’s Chicago office, where 1972 Harvard Law School graduate John G. Levi oversaw the firm’s recruiting at his alma mater and 1976 Northwestern Law School graduate Geraldine Alexis headed up Sidley’s minority associate recruiting effort.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Barack learned the surprising news in that day’s New York Times: “Albert Raby, Civil Rights Leader in Chicago with King, Dies at 55.” A memorial service at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel attracted more than a thousand mourners, and Teresa Sarmina, one of Raby’s former spouses, spoke of how he “would get excited about a person and the potential he could see in that person.”

In Cambridge, the last two weeks of fall semester classes featured a December 7 meeting with Ian Macneil that about 60 percent of Section III attended. “A wide range of complaints were voiced,” Macneil recalled, and tensions were raised further because the final exam in the yearlong course would not take place until late May. Only in their final week of classes in mid-December did Section III learn that its other exams would take place on the afternoons of Monday January 9, Wednesday the 11th, and Friday the 13th. With Civ Pro teacher David Shapiro leaving for Washington, students’ marks on the two-and-a-half-hour open-book midyear test would constitute half of their eventual grade on Harvard’s somewhat odd A+, A, A-, B+ B, B-, C-, and D eight-point scale. Shapiro posed only two essay questions of equal weight, one involving securities fraud and the other concerning an interlocutory (interim) appeal involving hundreds of lawsuits stemming from a hotel fire. No one could have found it easy. Two days later, Richard Parker’s three-and-a-half-hour open-book Crim Law exam posed three questions weighted at 50, 25, and 25 percent. The first posed a hilariously complicated fictional scenario involving a racially profiled terror suspect carrying cocaine who bumps into a knife-wielding drunk who then stabs a passerby. Students were instructed to “respond specifically to all” of six analytical issues. The shorter second and third questions were visibly easier, with the former offering as one of two options an essay on the Burger and Rehnquist Courts’ rulings on searches and interrogations. The third requested a response to a quotation asserting that changes in substantive criminal law doctrines offered a better chance of combating racism than did procedural reforms. On Friday the 13th, Section III’s exam week ended with a three-hour, open-book, two-question Torts exam from David Rosenberg. “Careful organization will be highly valued, as will conciseness and clarity of presentation,” the exam advised. One question dealt with a gang fight prompted by a movie about gang warfare, the second probed a manufacturer’s liability after a polio vaccination of a child infected the youngster’s father.⁹

With his first three exams complete, Obama flew to Chicago for ten days before spring semester classes began. Staying with Jerry Kellman’s family, Barack immediately learned that Al Raby’s death was not the only sadness that had befallen his Chicago friends. When Barack left Chicago in mid-August, Mike Kruglik replaced Greg Galluzzo as DCP’s consultant-adviser, and in Mike’s first heart-to-heart conversation with John Owens, Johnnie confessed that he was losing a struggle with cocaine addiction. “I was shocked,” Kruglik recalled, but he immediately arranged for Owens to enter a thirty-day residential treatment program on Chicago’s North Side and drove him there to help him check in.

A month later, Johnnie was back at DCP, but the group’s core members felt he had not been prepared to fully shoulder the weight of being executive director. “John was good, but he was not Barack,” Betty Garrett explained. “There was no one in my eyesight that would have been able to fill Barack’s shoes.” Aletha Strong Gibson remembered that they all realized that Owens “wasn’t quite ready” to assume such “a high-pressure position.”

Jean Rudd and Ken Rolling at Woods felt similarly. “When Barack left, Johnnie was really very feeling kind of abandoned,” Jean recalled. “He wasn’t quite ready to be in charge yet” and “just wasn’t confident at that point.” Ken agreed that “John became director before his time.” When Barack learned what had happened, he discussed the situation with Jean, Ken, and Jerry, who remembered that he was “deeply concerned about it” because “he’s feeling responsible.” Kellman also thought that if “DCP blows up in a scandal,” it could hurt Barack’s reputation. Owens recalled that Barack “suggested that I change the name of DCP” because he “figured if I didn’t do a good job with it or something went wrong, it wouldn’t come back to haunt him.” Johnnie saw Barack as deeply strategic about his own future, but Barack refused to acknowledge that. “I was pressing him one time, and he got angry. ‘No! I said no!’ ” But Barack’s exceptionally rare outburst did not alter Owens’s firm belief.

During Obama’s first semester at Harvard, the Illinois legislature had finally approved a comprehensive Chicago school reform bill, which Chicago United’s Patrick Keleher praised as “a fantastic bill,” one that called for every Chicago public school to be governed by an eleven-member Local School Council composed of six parents, two area residents, two teachers, and the principal. UNO and Gamaliel had played a significant role in the victory, but the hard work of implementing it still lay ahead.

Barack had corresponded regularly with Mary Ellen Montes throughout the fall. “The letters came for a while,” Lena remembered, but then there was “a determining letter that was sort of like we weren’t going to write to each other anymore, and so we didn’t.” By January 1989, Lena was involved with someone else, and she and Barack were never again in touch. In Lena’s and Sheila’s absence, and with his friendship with Johnnie now seriously strained, Barack’s two strongest Chicago relationships were with Kellman and Kruglik, and during his ten days back in Chicago, he readily helped both of them with their ongoing organizing work.

Jerry was now fully occupied in Gary, Indiana, and thanks to both Woods and the Diocese of Gary, he had just publicly launched Lake Interfaith Families Together (LIFT), named after the county that encompassed much of northwest Indiana. In Chicago’s south suburbs, Mike was rapidly growing the South Suburban Action Conference (SSAC), and in January 1989, he hired a new young African American organizer, Thomas Rush, a 1988 graduate of Haverford College.

Rush recalled that even during his first long conversation with Kruglik, Mike mentioned Barack, with the implication being that “this guy was special within organizing.” Mike asked Barack to call Thomas, and the next morning they met for forty-five minutes over coffee. Knowing that Barack was at Harvard, Rush expected someone arrogant, but instead he thought Obama was calm and self-assured, with an “even temperament.” Rush remembered that when Barack mentioned Jeremiah Wright, it was “almost like his mind left for a minute” as Barack looked away. When Thomas asked how attending Harvard Law School would connect to further organizing work, Barack said, “I don’t know that I’ll be directly involved, but this will always be a process that I support, whatever I do.”

A few days later, during a LIFT training in Gary, which Kruglik and Rush attended, Obama, along with Kellman, led the day’s sessions for a group of some forty people. At the end of the day, Rush rode back into Chicago with Barack. As Thomas recalled it, Barack mentioned “that he would like to find a good relationship,” ideally “a woman with the body of Whitney Houston and the mind of Toni Morrison.”

Before Barack returned to Cambridge, he had his summer job interview at Sidley & Austin’s Chicago office. “We brought in all of the kids who had a Chicago connection,” John Levi recalled, for twenty-minute conversations with two or more Sidley lawyers. African American applicants generally were seen by a trio of Levi, Geraldine Alexis, and Alexis’s chief lieutenant, Michelle Robinson, the 1988 Harvard Law graduate who had played such an active role in BLSA before joining Sidley eight months earlier.

“Michelle I distinctly remember saying, ‘I cannot see him. Will you please make sure you can see him?’ ” Levi remembered. He did, and “I was wowed” by Obama. “I thought he was phenomenal. He was one of the best interviews I’ve ever had, really.” He recalls that Obama demonstrated “poise and sparkle” and clearly was “a compelling person.” Geri Alexis had a similar reaction. “I remember very vividly” speaking with Barack. “He impressed me so much that I called down to the recruiting office, and I said, ‘We really need to give this guy an offer before he leaves the building,’ and they said, ‘Well, we don’t do that for 1Ls,’ and I said, ‘You’re going to do it for this one,’ ” and they did.

John Levi concurred. “I called Michelle later in the day and said, ‘Boy, did you miss a good one,’ ” and Robinson replied, “ ‘That’s what everybody is telling me.’ ” As Levi recalled, Barack “accepted quickly too.”¹⁰

Spring classes began on January 25, and Barack, Rob Fisher, Mark Kozlowski, and Cassandra Butts all chose for their elective 18th and 19th Century American Legal History, taught by assistant professor William “Terry” Fisher, a 1982 Harvard Law graduate who had clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. The three-hour-a-week lecture class covered “the formative era of American law,” with emphasis on the changes between the Revolution and the Civil War, especially regarding slavery. Famous cases like Marbury v. Madison and McCulloch v. Maryland were supplemented by doctrinal-specific readings addressing contracts, torts, property law, criminal law, and the status of women. The semester’s final three weeks were devoted to slavery, with recent articles by leading scholars like Paul Finkelman and Robert Cottroll playing a central role.

Section III’s Civ Pro also met for three hours a week, with Northeastern’s Stephen Subrin replacing David Shapiro. Some students found Subrin likable, while others felt he was a letdown compared to Shapiro. Contracts with Ian Macneil continued for three hours a week while Three Speech reported an unsupported rumor that “the Scowling Scot” might remain at Harvard more than one year. Lisa Hay occasionally included a crossword puzzle, and one had the clue, “He pauses before speaking.” The correct answer was “Obama.”

Rob Fisher had stopped attending Contracts—“It was so horrible that I basically skipped all of it”—but Barack remained a regular if sometimes tardy presence. Three Speech’s list of “highlights” included “February 21: Obama knocks on contracts door, 9:21 A.M.,” more than twenty minutes late. Ken Mack remembered that Barack was one of Macneil’s “favorite students,” and Macneil recalled that he had “such a commanding presence…. I was always a little too impatient in class, so if students went off the track, I would interrupt before I should. When I did that with Barack, he said ‘Let me finish.’ He wasn’t rude, just firm.’ ”

Spring’s most weighty course was five hours a week of Property Law, taught by Mary Ann Glendon, a 1961 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School who had joined the Harvard faculty in 1987. She assigned the class A. James Casner et al.’s 1,315-page Cases and Text on Property, 3rd ed. On the first day, Glendon called on Barack, mispronouncing his surname by making it rhyme with Alabama. Barack corrected her. Paolo Di Rosa thought that “was kind of a nervy thing to do,” but Barack “had the confidence to do that without being rude about it.”

Three Speech regularly captured how Glendon’s excellent sense of humor made for a relaxed classroom atmosphere. “I assume that a lot of you are in some relation to Harvard,” Glendon suggested. “What’s that relation? What? No, I don’t mean ‘serfdom.’ ” On another occasion, a student asked, “How long do you have to, you know, ah, live together, for these common-law marriages?” and Glendon drily responded, “Why do you ask?” Glendon was a widely popular teacher, and Rob Fisher remembered her as “an excellent professor” whom he and Barack visited for some “very open-ended, interesting intellectual discussions.” Fellow students recall both Barack and Rob as regular classroom participants. Ken Mack thought Glendon was “very interested in what Obama had to say in class” and “liked him a lot.” Edward Felsenthal, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of Princeton, would “vividly remember” Barack as someone who “talked all the time” in Property. There were some “heated battles between Barack and Mary Ann Glendon,” Felsenthal recalled, because Obama “objected to some pretty core tenets of the common law of property.” So “they went at it,” and “nobody else sparred like he sparred with her.” Rob remembered a time when Glendon asked why a court had set aside a condominium bylaw barring children as residents. Barack spoke up, saying, “Folks gotta live someplace,” and “everyone laughs,” but the crux of his response—the reasonableness standard—was indeed key. That “tells you a lot about how he was thinking about” legal questions while at Harvard, Rob explains. He and Barack “loved” Glendon’s “great” class, even though twenty years later Glendon would refuse to appear on the same platform with her former student because of her intense opposition to abortion.¹¹

In early February, the Harvard Law Record and the Harvard Crimson gave front-page coverage to news that the student-run Harvard Law Review had elected an Asian American 2L as its new president and an African American woman as one of its two supervising editors. Crystal Nix, a 1985 Princeton graduate who had been a New York Times reporter prior to law school, was the first black person ever elevated to one of the Review’s top masthead positions.

Far more controversial news landed a week later when Harvard president Derek Bok, a 1954 graduate of the law school who had served as its dean for three years before being elevated to the presidency in 1971, unexpectedly chose forty-four-year-old Robert C. Clark as the new law dean. Clark was “generally well-liked by students,” the Crimson reported, because he was an excellent classroom teacher, but some of his more liberal colleagues complained about the selection of the conservative law and economics proponent. In the Boston Globe and the New York Times, Gerald Frug called Clark “a terrible choice” and Morton Horwitz denounced the selection as “a disaster for the law school,” asserting that Clark had opposed the appointments of women and minority professors. Clark rebutted Horwitz’s claims as “untrue” and “terribly unfair,” while three more professors attacked Clark. In contrast, prominent liberal constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe spoke positively about Clark, and a Wall Street Journal editorial praised the selection. Several weeks later the controversy seemed to subside when the faculty unanimously promoted Randall Kennedy and Kathleen Sullivan to full professor, the third black male and the sixth white woman holding tenured appointments.¹²

At 12:30 P.M. on Thursday, February 23, the 1Ls’ exam grades were finally distributed. Barack and Rob had mixed reactions. In David Rosenberg’s Torts, Rob earned a straight A, and Barack something similar, but in Richard Parker’s Crim Law, Rob received only a B+, and as he remembered, “Barack and I both didn’t like the grade we got.” Many classmates would have been overjoyed to receive a B+, as they confronted lower grades than they had ever before received. For some, the “effect was devastating,” but not so for Barack and Rob, who plunged into the Ames Moot Court assignment that would culminate with a faux oral argument on Thursday evening, March 23, the night before spring break began.

The ungraded Ames exercise had four written assignments: an initial “issues analysis” of the faux case, an outline of the brief to the three-judge faux court, a draft of the brief, as well as the final brief. Throughout the six weeks, students had four conferences with Scott Becker, the twenty-five-year-old 3L from Illinois who had led their fall Legal Methods class and was now the teams’ adviser. Barack and Rob took opposing sides, with Mark Kozlowski as Barack’s partner and Lisa Hertzer as Rob’s. Their case involved two issues related to inside information and the stock market: the first was whether a clerical employee had violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 in buying stock based on a research report she had proofread, and the second was whether sharing that information with a friend with whom she then twice purchased stock represented a conspiracy punishable under the RICO Act of 1970. Each student team was given a twenty-two-page faux indictment of the two defendants, “Janine Egan” and “Jennifer Cleary,” that gave the facts that had led to their convictions, which were now on appeal.

Early on, Barack and Rob took the exercise “extraordinarily seriously,” Mark thought, and exhibited great determination to win the competition. But once it sank in that it was ungraded, their emerging desire to graduate magna cum laude—5.80 or better, with 6 representing A minus—took precedence. Rob knew that for Barack “it was very important to him to get magna cum laude … to demonstrate that things”—i.e., a Harvard Law School diploma—“weren’t given to him” as a result of how affirmative action may have helped him win admission. Mark Kozlowski realized that Barack and Rob “both decided they were going to make magna cum laude,” and that made them “less serious about” the Ames exercise as it proceeded.

In advance of the two pairs’ oral arguments before Professor Hal Scott and two other faux judges, Mark and Barack completed their thirteen-page brief, with Barack writing the insider trading argument and Mark handling the RICO question. Barack contended that Egan’s work “inevitably” and “necessarily” would have made her aware that the materials she had proofread were nonpublic information, which she then misappropriated in violation of the 1934 statute. Barack flubbed badly in referencing the U.S. “Court of Appeals of the Second District,” when he should have written “for the Second Circuit,” and a careful eye would have caught misspellings and bad grammatical errors, such as “recieve,” “the harm done by insider trading are diffused,” and “employes like Egan regarding the in no way mitigates.” It was visibly sloppy work, especially compared to what Mark offered in the RICO section. “The Egan-Cleary enterprise victimized not merely” Egan’s employer, they argued in conclusion, “but the integrity of the securities market as a whole.” Oral argument turned into “a bit of a fiasco,” Kozlowski remembered, when he “got into a fight” with Professor Scott. “Barack was somewhat angry with me afterward,” Mark recalled, but “by that point” both Barack and Rob were happy to leave moot court behind them.¹³

That same day, Ian Macneil received a letter from the Women’s Law Association, complaining that Section III’s Contracts reading earlier that week had contained sexist material. In dealing with a convoluted contracts problem known as “the battle of the forms,” Macneil’s casebook invoked the phrase “jockeying for position” and then quoted a couplet from Byron’s “Don Juan”: “A little still she strove, and much repented, / And whispering, ‘I will ne’er consent,’—consented.” Given Section III’s history with Macneil, some classmates knew as soon as they read those lines that controversy would follow. Bonnie Savage, the WLA chair, wrote, “Repeated instances of sexism in both your contracts textbook and your classroom discussions have been brought to the attention of the Women’s Law Association.” She said the Byron quote reflected “sexist attitudes” and “has no place in a contracts textbook.” Indeed, “by using sexist language, you encourage sexist thought and, in essence, promote hostility against women.”

Macneil later acknowledged, “I knew the class considered me a first-class bastard,” but the WLA aspersions were “a bolt out of the blue.” When classes resumed after spring break on Monday, April 3, every member of Section III and every member of the law school faculty received an eight-page, single-spaced letter of rebuttal that Macneil addressed to the WLA. “Throughout the year I have had a great many complaints about the course from students of both sexes,” but only two had anything to do with gender, and at the December 7 grievance session, “not a word was said about any alleged sexism.” Macneil declared that “this whole affair … reeks of McCarthyism” and said its roots lay in his efforts “to insist that students act like professionals in the classroom respecting participation, preparation, attendance, and promptness.” Two days later, Macneil reiterated his mandatory sign-in policy, saying he had referred the names of three regular absentees to law school administrators. A number of students spoke up in support of Macneil, and others asked about the upcoming, much-feared final exam.

A week later, the Boston Globe published a lengthy story, highlighting “Macneil’s tough classroom manner” plus “his volatile temper and argumentative style.” The Globe quoted Bonnie Savage as saying the WLA feared Harvard might give Macneil a permanent appointment. More significant, Jackie Fuchs told the paper that Macneil “goes out of his way to avoid being sexist,” and that she, like a good many other Section III women, felt that WLA’s “letter was really out of line.” The Harvard Law Record’s own extensive coverage included multiple students noting that they had been given no notice that the law school’s long-dormant attendance policy might suddenly be enforced.

Within Section III, the news coverage generated something of a pro-Macneil backlash. Brad Wiegmann remembered feeling badly for Macneil because “people were treating it as if it was the civil rights movement over whether you had to attend your Contracts class.” Lisa Hay believed Macneil “got a raw deal” from Section III, and David Troutt agreed he was “a decent guy” whose relational view of contracts “actually was probably a good theory.” Among students who later became contracts lawyers, some, like David Attisani and Shannon Schmoyer, said that Macneil’s course had been of no professional value, but an equal if not greater number strongly disagreed. Steven Heinen “really appreciated his very practical approach to contracts,” and said Macneil’s teaching has “served me well” in later years. David Smail, who would become general counsel of a prominent international hotel corporation, remembers Macneil as “a pompous asshole,” but “as much as I despised the man,” Macneil’s “relationship approach to contracts is one that I really fervently believe in, and I preach it every day in my business.” As a general counsel, “you’re living with the contract rather than just drafting it,” and Macneil’s perspective “is a very powerful way of looking at contracts.”

Soon after the news stories, law school administrators convened a small meeting with Macneil and several students. Ali Rubin remembered that Barack had “distanced himself from” the complaints, and Mark Kozlowski knew that Barack felt “there was nothing we could do about it.” Rob remembered that “Barack and I both felt that the revolution was a little over the top,” and by April, Obama was playing “a mediating role” and was “calming people down.”

Lauren Ezrol, one of Section III’s official representatives on the Law School Council, recalled being summoned to the meeting. “It was Barack, me, and then everyone else in the room was an administrative type, like a dean of students, and Macneil was there.” They were “supposed to try to work out the issues,” but rather than some dean taking the lead, instead Barack “was the one who with great confidence talked to Macneil” and “worked out whatever resolution” was agreed to. Ezrol thought Obama was “unbelievably impressive,” and his interaction with Macneil was entirely amicable. “I was just blown away,” Ezrol remembered, “to see someone operate with such ease and confidence and maturity. It was remarkable.” Years later, just prior to his death, at age eighty, in 2010, Macneil recalled that Obama was “a calm person in a class that was not altogether characterized by people being calm,” adding that it was “obvious that his class respected him.”¹⁴

Barack and Rob continued to visit David Rosenberg even after their fall Torts class ended. Rosenberg believed they should expose themselves to “the best minds on the faculty,” and as the time for choosing 2L fall courses drew near, Rosenberg recommended well-known constitutional law teacher Laurence H. Tribe. For most 1Ls, it would take a good deal of gumption to approach one of Harvard’s most prominent professors, Rosenberg knew, but on Friday, March 31, Obama did so, and Tribe was immediately taken by this heretofore unknown student. As Tribe remembered it, their first conversation lasted for more than an hour, and before it ended, Tribe asked Obama to become one of his many research assistants, which Tribe had never asked of a 1L who had yet to take one of his courses. Tribe wrote his name—“Barack Obama 1L!”—on that day’s desk calendar page, and soon Barack drew Rob Fisher into this relationship with Tribe as well.

When word spread among their close aquaintances that both Obama and Fisher were now working for Tribe, Ken Mack can remember thinking how astonishing that was. Tribe was so impressed by Barack that he mentioned him to his colleague Martha Minow, a 1979 Yale Law School graduate who had clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall before joining the Harvard faculty in 1981. Minow was always interested in students from Chicago, because she had grown up in the city’s northern suburbs and her father, Newton Minow, who had served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission during the Kennedy administration, was now a Sidley & Austin senior partner. Martha told her father about Tribe’s impression of Obama, and he picked up the phone and called John Levi to ask if Sidley’s Harvard recruiters knew about this 1L who had wowed Laurence Tribe. Levi had a ready answer: “We’ve already hired him…. He’s coming here for the summer.”

Before Barack began studying in earnest for late May’s final exams, he faced a trio of choices. Wednesday night, April 12, was the informational meeting for 1Ls interested in the weeklong writing competition that would take place in early June to select thirty-eight members of the Class of 1991 for the prestigious Harvard Law Review. The next evening was the initial editors’ meeting for the upcoming year’s Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, which Barack had worked on as one of thirty 1Ls during the preceding months. One 2L editor, Sung-Hee Suh, remembered Barack “talking very calmly” during a sometimes heated discussion of hate speech, “articulating both sides” of the debate as students of color and free speech absolutists disagreed vehemently on the issue. She recalled thinking he was very “calm, cool, and collected.” Outgoing managing editor Wendy Pollack noted that Barack did not participate in the journal’s election for the upcoming year’s board, a clear sign that he intended to try for the premier Law Review instead. Barack had asked David Rosenberg whether he should do so, and Rosenberg said, “Yes, of course.”

April 13 was also preregistration for fall classes, but the 1Ls would not learn until May 8 whether or not they had gotten into popular, oversubscribed courses, such as Laurence Tribe’s section of Constitutional Law. Cassandra Butts remembered that “Barack did not get in,” but some “special pleading” with Tribe quickly succeeded.

Monday, May 15, was the last day of spring classes, and Lauren Ezrol and Michelle Jacobs both recall Obama telling their Contracts class that anyone who would like a copy of the outline he had prepared from both semesters’ worth of notes was welcome to it. Jacobs remembered that the document was easily 100, if not 150, typed pages and “had little jokes in it. It was great.” Barack had many takers, because almost everyone agreed with Greg Sater’s assessment that Barack “was the smartest in the class.” Lauren Ezrol agreed: “he just seemed smart and impressive and so sure of himself and well-spoken and older.”

Barack had his Legal History take-home exam on Monday, May 22, followed by Section III’s trio of tests: Property on Wednesday afternoon, Contracts on Friday morning, and Civ Pro on Tuesday, May 30. Property and Civ Pro would cover just the spring, but Macneil’s Contracts exam would determine everyone’s entire grade for the full year, six credits, and “people were really worried,” Brad Wiegmann remembered. David Attisani asserted that Section III suffered “mass hysteria” in advance of the Macneil final.

Mary Ann Glendon’s Property exam was an unpleasant surprise to many members of Section III, with Mark Kozlowski remembering that some of the questions “had nothing to do with the stuff we had covered in class.” Steven Heinen agreed, recalling that students first encountered the word “easement” only on the test. Half of the test, involving six specific questions, concerned Native Americans on “Vintucket” island who were being pressured to sell their seaside property to an aggressive celebrity. An estranged, unmarried couple’s frozen embryos, a building lease, and a “takings” issue constituted the balance of Glendon’s exam.

Friday morning, May 26, brought literal shrieks of horror when angry students confronted Ian Macneil’s bizarrely demanding Contracts exam, which instructed them to write their answers “ONLY INSIDE THE BOX AFTER EACH QUESTION” on the twenty-five-page test. The first, three-part, twenty-minute question asked whether a U.S.–Soviet nuclear missile treaty did or did not constitute a contract, depending on how that concept was defined. An answer of up to fourteen lines was permitted. Ten subsequent questions, ranging from ten to twenty-five minutes apiece, involved, among other topics, a nephew cut out of a will on account of his race and the sale of fourteen hundred convertible sofas. Student complaints raged. Following the Memorial Day weekend, Section III’s “very intense year,” as Paolo Di Rosa termed it, ended with a straightforward two-question open-book Civ Pro exam from Stephen Subrin.¹⁵

Two hundred eighty-five 1Ls—179 men and 106 women—had decided to enter the Harvard Law Review’s writing competition, and only one day separated the end of final exams and the distribution of the HLR materials. The weeklong assignment consisted of two parts. First was a Bluebook test—The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, then in its fourteenth edition, dated back to 1926, and was the most widely used style manual in legal academia. First-year students had been introduced to the volume’s arcane instructions, especially for abbreviations, the previous fall in Legal Methods, but this HLR competition was their first real opportunity to apply its editing rules.

The second and far more demanding part entailed writing a lengthy essay—in law review parlance a “note”—weighing the merits and demerits of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County. A 6–3 majority had rebuffed a claim that a child who suffered severe brain damage at his father’s hands could sue the local child protection agency, alleging a deprivation of his Fourteenth Amendment right to “liberty.” The Fourteenth Amendment covers only state action, and the majority held that state officials do not have a constitutional obligation to protect children from their parents. Justice Harry A. Blackmun filed an emotional dissent.

Barack had a full week to work on the two-part assignment before it had to be postmarked and mailed to the Review’s offices. But on the day it was due, his car would not start, and time was short. He called Rob Fisher, who was just heading out the door, but Rob immediately drove to Somerville and took Barack to the closest post office, where there was a long line. But Rob remembered Barack successfully sweet-talking his way forward, explaining to people that his envelope had to be postmarked by noon.

On the cover sheet that accompanied the submission, the applicant was asked for their summer contact information. They also had the option of indicating their gender and race, and they could provide a brief personal statement if they had experienced any major hardships in life. The writing competition dated back to 1969, but only in 1981 did the Review introduce affirmative action into the process to increase diversity. Only a trio of rising 2L editors who oversaw the selection process would know whether and to what degree those indicators were considered when all entrants’ scores were collated.

At the Review’s offices on the second and third floors of Gannett House, a wooden Greek Revival structure that dated to 1838, newly hired twenty-four-year-old editorial assistant Susan Higgins collected the 285 entries, assigned each a number, removed their cover sheets, and began sending batches of the submissions to the three dozen 2L editors, now scattered at their summer jobs all across the country. They would grade the numbered papers and send them back to Cambridge. Some of those 2Ls wondered whether the choice of DeShaney inadvertently gave 1Ls of one particular political stripe an advantage on their essays. “There were more interesting arguments to be made on the conservative side,” thought Dan Bromberg, a 1986 summa cum laude graduate of Yale, “and so more points to be won” there than for 1Ls who sided with the dissenters. The grading was a multiweek process, at the end of which the 2L officers, including President Peter Yu, the Review’s first Asian American leader, collated the results and factored in the contestants’ 1L grades that Susan Higgins had gotten from the registrar’s office.

Half of the thirty-eight slots would go to the top writing competition scorers; the other half would be determined by an equation based 30 percent upon those scores and 70 percent upon their 1L grades. If a contestant had indicated their minority status, that fact, but not their names, was flagged on their submission. Gordon Whitman, incoming cochair of the Review’s Articles Office and a member of the selection trio, recalled that race was “a little bit of a featherweight on the process,” but it did not count “a whole lot.” Only when the numerical selections had been made did Susan Higgins match the chosen numbers with the individuals’ names: “I was the keeper of the names with the numbers,” she explained.

In midsummer, the successful contestants—twenty-two men and sixteen women—received a phone call, and then a confirming letter, telling them they had been selected. But there was a tangible cost: they would have to leave their highly remunerative summer jobs three weeks early to return to Cambridge before the beginning of fall classes, to start work on the Review’s first issue of the new academic year.¹⁶

In preparation for the summer, Barack had “sublet the cheapest apartment I could find,” hardly a block north from where he and Sheila had lived in Hyde Park. He also had “purchased the first three suits ever to appear in my closet and a new pair of shoes that turned out to be half a size too small and would absolutely cripple me for the next nine weeks.” Working at a corporate law firm like Sidley reintensified his fears from a year earlier that going to Harvard “represented the abandonment of my youthful ideals.” But choosing Harvard over Northwestern’s full-cost scholarship meant that “with student loans rapidly mounting, I was in no position to turn down the three months of salary Sidley was offering.”

Obama arrived late for his first day at Sidley’s offices at 10 South Dearborn. It was a rainy June morning. Some days earlier, he had spoken by phone with Michelle Robinson, whom Geraldine Alexis and senior associate Linzey Jones had assigned as Barack’s summer adviser because of their mutual Harvard ties. Obama remembered that “she was very corporate and very proper on the phone, trying to explain to me how the summer program at Sidley and Austin was going to go.”

Barack was shown to her office that first day, and Michelle recalled in 2004 that “he was actually cute and a lot more articulate and impressive than I expected. My first job was to take him to lunch, and we ended up talking for what seemed like hours.” She had expected a biracial, Hawaiian-raised Harvard Law student to be “nerdy, strange, off-putting” and even “weird,” but instead Barack was “confident, at ease with himself … easy to talk to and had a good sense of humor,” she recounted. “I was pleasantly surprised by who he turned out to be.” She did however recall that “he had this bad sport jacket and a cigarette dangling from his mouth.”

Rob Fisher was also working at Sidley’s Chicago office for the summer, and he remembered Barack coming by his office soon after they arrived. “He came in one day and said, ‘My mentor is really hot.’ ” As Michelle’s friend and Sidley colleague Kelly Jo MacArthur recalled, Barack wasted little time in making his interest clear. “He would try to charm her, flirt with her, and she would act very professional. He was undeniably charming and interesting and attractive,” but Michelle rebuffed Barack’s repeated suggestions that they do something together. “She was being so professional, so serious,” MacArthur remembered, and she also knew that Michelle was someone with “conservative morals.”

When Barack pressed, Michelle was characteristically direct and told him that as his adviser, it would look bad if they began going out together. Instead, she tried to set him up with several of her girlfriends, just as she did with Tom Reed, another African American 1L summer associate and Chicago native who had been one year behind her as an undergraduate at Princeton. But Barack persisted. Finally, toward the end of June, Michelle reluctantly agreed. “OK, we will go on this one date, but we won’t call it a date. I will spend the day with you.”

On Friday, June 30, they left Sidley’s offices at about noon and walked the few blocks to the Art Institute of Chicago on South Michigan Avenue to have lunch. “He was talking Picasso,” Michelle remembered. “He impressed me with his knowledge of art.” Then they “walked up Michigan Avenue. It was a really beautiful summer day, and we talked, and we talked.”

Barack had a plan. Opening that evening was a movie that already had been the subject of three different articles in the Chicago Tribune: young African American director Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. It was an ingenious idea, but Michelle’s concern about appearances turned all too real when they saw Sidley’s Newton Minow and his wife Jo at the theater. “I think they were a little embarrassed” at being seen together, Minow recalled. After the film, Michelle remembered, “we had a deep conversation about that” and then ended the day “having drinks at the top of the John Hancock Building,” which “gives you a beautiful view of the city.”

“I liked him a lot. He was cute, and he was funny, and he was charming,” Michelle remembered thinking, but after their encounter with the Minows she was all the more determined not to become a subject of office gossip. But when Barack invited her to accompany him to a training he had agreed to do for DCP at one of the Roseland churches, she agreed to go along.

The small group was “mostly single parent mothers,” but she recalled that Barack’s “eloquent” presentation “about the world as it is and the world as it should be” was one she would never forget. “To see him transform himself from the guy who was a summer associate in a law firm with a suit and then to come into this church basement with folks who were like me, who grew up like me,” Michelle recounted, “and to be able to take off that suit and tie and become a whole ’nother person … someone who can make that transition and do it comfortably and feel comfortable in his own skin and to touch people’s hearts in the way that he did, because people connected with his message,” was remarkably impressive. “I knew then and there there’s obviously something different about this guy,” something “special,” and “it touched me … he made me think in ways that I hadn’t before,” Michelle explained. “What I saw in him on that day was authenticity and truth and principle. That’s who I fell in love with” in that church, and “that’s why I fell in love with him.”

Every summer Linzey Jones hosted a picnic at his home in south suburban Park Forest for all of Sidley’s minority attorneys and summer associates. Events like this were standard fare because summer programs at big law firms were aimed at enticing the students into eventually accepting a permanent job offer. Evie Shockley, an African American 1L from the University of Michigan Law School who shared an office with Barack for part of that summer, recalled attending a Cubs game, seeing Phantom of the Opera, and other theater outings. “It was easy to feel like you weren’t working,” she explained.

That weekend day, Linzey Jones remembered Barack and Michelle being “very friendly with each other,” but Barack joined in when many of the men went to a nearby junior high school to play basketball for an hour. Michelle still lived with her parents in their South Shore home, a few miles below Hyde Park, and when she drove Barack back to his apartment, he offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins on the north side of East 53rd Street. Michelle accepted, and ordered chocolate. Sitting outside, Barack told her about working at Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu “and how difficult it was to look cool when you had the apron and the little brown cap on.” Then, in a direct reprise of a question he had posed three summers earlier, also in Hyde Park, he asked Michelle “if I could kiss her. It tasted of chocolate.”

“We spent the rest of the summer together,” Barack later wrote, but a mid-July phone call informed him that a letter inviting him to join the Law Review was in the mail. That good news meant he had to be back in Cambridge by August 16 to work on the Review’s first issue. He took several days to ponder his choice. “We had a conversation about whether or not he was going to do Law Review,” fellow summer associate Tom Reed recalled. “ ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to do it,’ ” Tom remembered Barack saying. “He was clearly on the fence,” and “there was a moment where he was considering whether that was appropriate for his path.” But finally he told HLR as well as Sidley that he was accepting the offer.

Barack and Michelle kept a very low profile at the law firm, and neither Tom Reed nor Evie Shockley had any idea they were dating. Michelle told only Kelly Jo MacArthur. “When she met Barack, things happened pretty quickly,” Kelly Jo remembered. Michelle recalled years later during a joint interview her memories of “the apartment you were in when we first started dating,” the sublet near Baskin-Robbins. “That was a dump.” But bumping into people they knew seemed inevitable. Jean Rudd of the Woods Fund recounted, “I have a very vivid memory of having lunch on Dearborn Street at an outdoor café there, and Barack and this tall, beautiful woman walk by. And he stopped and introduced us and said that ‘This is my boss.’ … We chatted a little while,” and when they left “I remember saying, ‘What a couple.’ ”¹⁷

One late July evening, Michelle invited Barack home for dinner to meet her parents and brother. Craig Robinson, at twenty-seven years old, was two years older than his sister and also had attended Princeton University. As a senior he was Ivy League basketball’s 1983 Player of the Year, and after graduation he had played professional basketball in Europe for several years before returning home. Craig met Janis Hardiman, a 1982 Barnard College graduate, soon after she moved to Chicago in 1983, and by 1987 they were engaged and living together in Hyde Park while Craig took classes toward an M.B.A. degree at the University of Chicago. Janis and Craig married in August 1988, soon after Michelle’s graduation from Harvard Law School. Ever since Michelle’s senior year of high school, Craig had known that his sister was quick to dispose of boyfriends, so he made a point of being at the Robinson family home at 7436 South Euclid Avenue to meet this newest suitor.

Craig and Michelle’s parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, were, like their children, lifelong residents of Chicago’s South Side. Both high school graduates, they had married in October 1960, but Fraser’s hope of finishing college was dashed by insufficient funds. In January 1964, just a few days before Michelle’s birth, Fraser was hired by the city water department, and Marian became a stay-at-home mom. In 1965 the young family moved from the Parkway Gardens Homes in Woodlawn to the cramped top floor of Marian’s aunt’s home on Euclid Avenue, in solidly middle-class South Shore. Craig and Michelle attended nearby Bryn Mawr Elementary School, where Craig skipped third grade and Michelle skipped second. Separate small bedrooms and a common study area gave them their own modest spaces at home. At work, tending steam boilers, Fraser won two promotions along with salary increases, but an increasingly dark cloud hung silently over the happy young family: at age thirty, Fraser had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, though, as Craig later wrote, “we never had an in-depth discussion at home about the frightening course that MS was known to take.” In time, Fraser needed to use a cane and then crutches to help him walk, but he stuck with his job. “We saw him struggle to get up and go to work,” Michelle recalled. “He didn’t complain—ever. He put his energy into us.”

When Michelle reached ninth grade and was admitted to Whitney Young High School, west of downtown, she spent hours a day riding city buses to and from school. Craig won admission to Princeton in 1979, and his father insisted the family would make the necessary financial sacrifices for Craig to go there rather than accept a full scholarship from some less prestigious institution. Michelle grew up thinking she was smarter than her brother, and although Craig had a difficult freshman year, Michelle resolved that if he could attend Princeton, so could she. Her mother knew that test taking was not her forte, and a high school counselor discouraged her interest in Princeton, but Michelle applied anyway and was admitted. The difference between the South Shore world from which Michelle came and the privileged backgrounds of Princeton’s overwhelmingly white and often wealthy student body was profoundly stark.

“The first time when I set foot in Princeton, when I first got in, I thought ‘There’s no way I can compete with these kids … I got in but I’m not supposed to be here,’ ” Michelle recalled. “I remember being shocked by college students who drove BMWs. I didn’t even know parents who drove BMWs.” In addition, black undergraduates realized that Princeton’s racial climate, even in 1981, left much to be desired. Angela Kennedy, one of Michelle’s closest friends, with whom she spent one summer working as counselors at a girls’ camp in New York’s Catskill Mountains, recalled that “It was a very sexist, segregated place. Things reminded you every single second that you’re black, you’re black, you’re black.”

Michelle thrived in Princeton’s classrooms, and by the beginning of her senior year, she was applying to Harvard Law School. Yet in a reprise of high school, her faculty adviser on her senior thesis downplayed her chances. After initially being wait-listed, in late spring of 1985 she was accepted to Harvard.

Michelle’s college thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” was a powerfully self-revealing document. “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before,” Michelle wrote. “I have found that at Princeton … I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.” Growing up in South Shore, neither of her parents had been especially outspoken about race, but Marian Robinson’s father Purnell “Southside” Shields, who died in 1983, “was a very angry man,” Michelle’s mother explained. “I had a father who could be very angry about race,” and Marian had given Craig the middle name Malcolm after the early 1960s’ angriest racial firebrand. Marian was likewise wary of interracial relationships. “I worry about races mixing because of the difficulty,” she confessed years later. “It’s just very hard.”

But Princeton made Michelle understand that “I’m as black as it gets.” In her thesis, she observed that “with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.” Looking ahead, that left her fearful. “The path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation in a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” She confessed that “my goals after Princeton are not as clear as before” and she rued how “the University does not often meet the social and academic needs of its Black population.” In addition, “unfortunately there are very few adequate support groups which provide some form of guidance and counsel for Black students having difficulty making the transition from their home environments to Princeton’s environment,” as both Michelle and her brother had. She now knew that Princeton was “infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League Universities.” And her exposure to some fellow students had taught her something else, something prescient indeed: “a Black individual may be unable to understand or appreciate the Black culture because that individual was not raised in that culture, yet still be able to identify as being a Black person.”

Harvard Law School did not offer a much different experience. Czerny Brasuell, Michelle’s one black female Princeton mentor, recounted Michelle telling her by telephone from Cambridge that “If I could do this over, I’m not sure that I would.” A female classmate told Michelle’s biographer Liza Mundy that Harvard “was not a friendly, happy atmosphere.” But once again Michelle persevered. After her 1L year, she returned to Chicago as a summer associate at the law firm of Chadwell & Kayser, working for female partner Jan Anne Dubin and staying with her parents in the home that her great-aunt had deeded to the Robinsons several years earlier, prior to her own death.

Back at Harvard for her 2L year, Michelle volunteered significant time at the Legal Aid Bureau, located one floor—and many status rungs—below the Harvard Law Review on Gannett House’s ground level. After her 2L year, she was a summer associate at Sidley & Austin’s Chicago office. When Sidley offered her a position once she graduated, Michelle readily accepted. At Harvard, “the plan was you go into a corporate firm. So that’s what I did. And there I was. All of a sudden, I was on this path.”

At graduation, her parents paid for a teasingly congratulatory message in the 1988 Harvard Law School Yearbook: “We knew you would do this fifteen years ago when we could never make you shut up.” That summer, Sidley paid for the bar review class she took alongside a friend of her brother’s, Alan King, but only on May 12, 1989—after taking the Illinois exam a second time—did Michelle become a member of the Illinois Bar. Working in Sidley’s intellectual property group, Michelle yearned for meaningful assignments. Given her Harvard loans, her Sidley salary was attractive, but she had not really intended to be a corporate lawyer. “I hadn’t really thought about how I got there,” she recalled. “It was just sort of what you did.”

Craig Robinson recalled the late July evening when Michelle introduced Barack to her family. “My sister brought him over to my mom and dad’s house. We all met him, had dinner. They left to go to the movie, and my mom and dad and I were talking: ‘Oh, what a nice guy. This is going to be great. Wonder how long he will last?’ ” Craig thought Barack was “smart, easygoing, good sense of humor,” but given Michelle’s proclivity for discarding boyfriends, Craig remembered thinking, “Too bad he won’t be around for long.” Marian Robinson was also impressed because “He didn’t talk about himself,” but instead drew out the Robinsons about their own lives and interests. “I didn’t know his mother was white for a long time,” Marian recalled. “It didn’t come up.”

Barack’s taste in movies ran to the realistic, and opening that weekend was Leola, the story of a bright seventeen-year-old African American Chicago girl whose desire to attend college was endangered when she became pregnant. Filmmaker Ruby Oliver was a fifty-year-old former day care operator, and seven weeks after they saw it, Barack talked about the ninety-five-minute movie—later retitled Love Your Mama—while addressing the real-life challenges confronted by black youths. Michelle and Barack continued to see each other almost every day, and when they went out, Michelle usually paid. “He had no money; he was really broke,” she remembered, plus “his wardrobe was kind of cruddy.” Barack’s Occidental roommate Paul Carpenter was visiting Chicago that August, and he heard about Michelle when the two old friends and Paul’s wife Beth had dinner one evening. Another night, Craig and his wife Janis dropped off Michelle at Barack’s sublet in Hyde Park, and Janis and Barack recognized each other from their time at Columbia. “He came out of his apartment to get Michelle, then he and I both said, ‘Oh my gosh, I remember you,’ ” Janis recounted.

Before Barack’s return to Cambridge, Michelle told Craig, “I really like this guy” and made a request. She had heard her father and Craig say that “you can tell a lot about a personality on the court,” something Craig had learned from Pete Carril, his college coach at Princeton. Michelle knew that Craig played basketball regularly at courts around Hyde Park, and he remembers her asking: “I want you to take him to play, to see what type of guy he is when he’s not around me.” Craig agreed to take on this task, but he recalled, “I was nervous because I had already met Barack a few times and liked him a lot.”

Craig quickly scheduled a meet-up, and they played “a hard five-on-five” for more than an hour. Craig’s nervousness quickly fell away because he could see that Barack was “very team oriented, very unselfish,” and “was aggressive without being a jerk.” Craig was happy he could “report back to my sister that this guy is first rate,” and Michelle was pleased. “It was good to hear directly from my brother that he was solid, and he was real, and he was confident, confident but not arrogant, and a team player.” Craig saw only one huge flaw in Barack’s skill set, but it was not relevant to Michelle’s question. “Barack is a left-handed player who can only go to his left.”

Before Obama headed back to Cambridge in mid-August, he knew that this new, two-month-old relationship with Michelle Robinson was perhaps on a par with his now-truncated, three-year-old involvement with Sheila. For Barack, the differences were huge. Sheila was also the biracial offspring of international parents; she had lived in Paris, spoke French and now Korean, and was comfortable around the globe—just like Australian-born, Indonesian-reared diplomat’s daughter Genevieve Cook before her. Michelle Robinson was a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, but she was a 100 percent product of Chicago’s African American South Side, just like so many of the women and men who had revolutionized Barack’s understanding of himself during his transformative years in Roseland.

Barack’s prior relationships had been with women who, like himself through 1985, were citizens of the world as much as they were of any particular country or city. Before Princeton, Michelle Robinson had spent one week each summer with her family at Dukes Happy Holiday Resort, an African American forest lodge in White Cloud, Michigan, forty miles north of Grand Rapids. But if Barack truly believed that his destiny entailed what he thought, he knew full well the value of having roots in one place and having that place be essential to your journey. And who more than Michelle Robinson and her family could personify the strong, deep roots of black Chicago?

Although Michelle would not know that Barack had shared his deeply private sense of destiny first with Sheila and then with Lena, before he left for Cambridge, Barack told Michelle about his belief about his future role. “He sincerely felt, from day one that I’ve known him, that he has an obligation,” Michelle explained, “because he has the talent, he has the passion and he has been blessed.”¹⁸

The Harvard Law Review, founded in 1887, was in 1989 the oldest and most prestigious legal publication in the United States. Edited entirely by students—beginning with thirty-eight from the rising 2L class, supplemented each successive summer by several top-GPA 3L “grade-ons” for an annual total of about forty—the Review published eight hefty issues a year—November through June—with the law students contributing twenty to forty or more hours of work weekly, aided by a trio of female office staffers and a quintet of part-time undergraduate work-study students. Beyond the law students, there was an oversight board of two professors, the dean, and an alumnus, but they played only a nominal role. In addition, playing an obtrusive role in the Review’s life was eighty-five-year-old eminence grise Erwin N. Griswold, the law school’s dean from 1946 to 1967 (and himself the Review’s top officer—president—in 1927–28), who critiqued every issue and was available to hector the student editors.

The mid-August return to Cambridge served two long traditions. One was to initiate the new 2L editors into the sometimes-complex internal workings of the Review. The masthead—the president, treasurer, managing editor, supervising editors (SEs), and executive editors (EEs)—oversaw the work of five “offices”: Articles, which reviewed scores of long manuscripts submitted by law professors nationwide and chose a dozen or so per year for publication; Notes, which selected and edited substantive analyses written by the HLR editors themselves; Book Reviews and Commentaries, which assigned and handled shorter pieces; “Devo,” or Developments in the Law, which prepared a major team-written study of some cutting-edge topic for publication in each year’s May issue; and Supreme Court, which oversaw the annual November issue and its several dozen student-written synopses of significant cases decided during the prior term of the U.S. Supreme Court. The November issue also contained the Review’s two top-status faculty contributions: the foreword, written every year since 1951 by an emerging star chosen by the editors, and a major case comment authored by an eminent academic, a feature added in 1985.

In HLR’s very elaborate editing system, overseen by the managing editor, student-written work moved from the offices to the SEs and then the EEs; faculty pieces went directly from the offices to the EEs. Everything also went through a “P-read,” in which the Review’s president recommended editorial changes. Each fall and winter “the 2Ls are the labor, the 3Ls are the management,” 2L editor Brad Berenson recounted, until a new masthead for the upcoming year was chosen from among the 2Ls early in February.

The second reason for the pre-semester start was that the November issue had to go to the printer by mid-October. The 2Ls needed an intensive refresher course in Bluebook legal citation style, followed by an introduction to two other common tasks: sub-citing, in which the accuracy of every quotation and footnoted reference in each piece was confirmed by checking the original source, and roto-pool, in which every faculty-submitted manuscript was read and evaluated by several editors before full consideration by the Articles Office.

Most 2Ls spent their first HLR semester in “the pool,” where almost every weekday morning a pink slip of paper from managing editor Scott Collins would appear in their pigeonhole mailbox in the editors’ lounge on the second floor of Gannett House, telling them what their work assignment was. Editors were enticed there each morning by a spread of free muffins and bagels. “My chocolate chip muffin was the mainstay of my morning,” 3L editor Diane Ring recalled. Thanks to the hefty income the Review received from sales of The Bluebook, free pastries seemed like “a very interesting strategy to make sure you got all those second-years on the doorstep every morning getting their assignment, doing the work,” Ring explained. Patrick O’Brien, also a 3L, remembered that “a lot of my law review involvement had to do with free bagels and cream cheese. It would get me there every morning for a free breakfast.” There also were free evening snacks for those who worked late, and as a result, Berenson recalled, Gannett House became “a gathering place,” “almost like a fraternity house for the editors.” Marisa Chun, a 2L, explained that the editors’ lounge and its television served as “our living room.” With everyone’s classes in nearby buildings, popping in and out was a constant feature of HLR life. For some editors, Gannett House became the center of their daily lives, while for others, especially those who were already married, the Review was more like a demanding part-time job.

The 2Ls had three ways out of the “hideous experience” of doing pool work: join the five-person “Devo” team, whose work would satisfy the law school’s written work requirement; join a multiperson group assigned to edit an especially difficult article; or write a note of one’s own, an option often postponed until the 3L year and almost always done for independent study credit under faculty supervision. Gordon Whitman, the 3L Articles Office cochair, had worked for a year as a community organizer in Philadelphia before starting law school and had successfully pushed for the acceptance of a manuscript that argued that the real-world theology of Martin Luther King Jr. offered a superior perspective for examining the contentions made by “critical legal studies” scholars.

The article’s author, Anthony E. Cook, was an African American associate professor of law at the University of Florida who had graduated magna cum laude from Princeton before getting his law degree at Yale. Cook’s dense and complicated analysis looked especially daunting, and Whitman recruited four new 2L editors to work on it: Christine Lee, the young Oberlin graduate who was just about to turn twenty-two, the now twenty-eight-year-old Barack Obama, whom Lee had disliked from their first introduction a year earlier, and two other visibly sharp 2Ls, Susan Freiwald, a 1987 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, and John Parry, a 1986 summa cum laude graduate of Princeton. The lengthy manuscript would require weeks of work—it was not scheduled for publication until the March issue—and these four knew by early September what their fall work for the Review would entail.¹⁹

Fall semester classes began on September 6. Barack and Rob had carefully debated their choices. In Laurence Tribe’s huge and oversubscribed Constitutional Law section, which met five hours per week, they were joined by a number of their 1L Section III classmates. The assigned casebook, William B. Lockhart et al.’s Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials, 6th ed., was the best available. Word among students was that African American professor Christopher Edley, who was back after serving as issues director for Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign, was “refreshingly good.” His class, Administrative Law, might sound dry and arcane, but Edley taught the sixty-five-student, four-hour-a-week class as an entirely practical “this is how the public policy process works” course, and he supplemented the main text, Walter Gellhorn et al.’s Administrative Law, 8th ed., with various other materials.

Rob and Barack had “an extended discussion” about taking Corporations, as most 2Ls did, weighing the upside value of “understanding the world” versus how their grades in the four-credit class might harm their goal of graduating magna cum laude. But they began it and kept it, finding that Professor Reinier Kraakman, a Yale law graduate with a Harvard sociology Ph.D., “had an interesting mind and approach.” Kraakman focused on “the control of managers in publicly held corporations” and emphasized “the functional analysis of legal rules as one set of constraints on corporate actors.” Rob and Barack found it “a good class, really cool,” and “really enjoyed it.”

Edley’s Ad Law was “almost as exciting as the Torts class” a year earlier with David Rosenberg. “Barack and I loved the Ad Law class” and “had a tremendous amount of fun” in it, Rob remembers, for Edley was “inspiring” and had “this very functional, argumentative intellectual approach.” The course “stimulated a lot of deep discussions,” plus a number of office-hours conversations with Edley, whom Rob thought was “truly a great teacher.”

Mark Kozlowski recalled that Tribe’s Constitutional Law had “a really lively atmosphere.” As in all sizable classes, seats were preassigned, and Scott Scheper, a 1988 summa cum laude graduate of Case Western Reserve University, found himself in a second-row aisle seat, at the front of the bowl-style classroom, with Obama just to his right. Like Scheper, Laura Jehl, a 1986 highest honors graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, had been in a different 1L section than Obama. But she already knew Tribe from her work on U.S. senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Judiciary Committee staff, and she was also already one of Tribe’s research assistants. Jehl took note of Obama from the outset of Tribe’s class. He “spoke up and said something eminently reasonable, eminently thoughtful,” and with an “absolutely amazing voice.”

Section III survivor Jennifer Radding remembered that Barack “was exceptional in Tribe’s class” and that “Tribe was like in love with him in a very intellectual way.” Sarah Leah Whitson witnessed it too. “Barack seemed to be operating at another level…. His rapport back and forth with Tribe felt more like a dialogue among equals.” Kevin Downey, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, noted how Obama spoke in “narrative-based” style that often included references to his own experiences, while Rob Fisher, who also stood out, made “more analytic comments.” Downey thought they “were leagues beyond the rest of us.”

Seated next to Obama, Scott Scheper had as close a view as anyone. Tribe was “a whole lot more theoretical” than he had anticipated, more interested in “What’s right? What should be?” than in “How is? What is?” Obama was “facile and adept,” and “talked more than any other single individual” in the class. Scheper recalled that “Tribe spent a whole lot of time not six feet from me in what almost became personal dialogue between him and Barack…. He would leave the lectern and come over … to our side of the class and be right in front of the front row and then Barack would be talking to him.” The scene made Scheper “sort of self-conscious that I had to maintain my posture because the whole class was looking right at me because that’s where the focus of the dialogue was.”

Several weeks in, Scheper’s demanding Trial Advocacy Workshop kept him away from Con Law for several classes. When he returned, Rob Fisher was in his spot, and Scheper realized that Obama “gave away my seat because I didn’t come to class.” Barack immediately apologized: “I thought you dropped the class.” Then the regular pattern resumed. Obama “was always engaged in these esoteric discussions with Professor Tribe…. They spent a lot of time talking about what the law should be.” All told, Rob explained, with Tribe plus Edley and Kraakman, fall 1989 “was a pretty fun semester.”²⁰

That fall was Robert Clark’s first as dean of the law school. The school had been in the news over the summer because of the arrest and suspension of an African American 3L accused of raping a Harvard undergraduate. But Clark played right into the hands of his detractors when he terminated the school’s public interest career counselor before the semester began. Clark called the move “a reorientation of resources” away from something that served only “symbolic, guilt-alleviating purposes,” but progressive students reacted immediately. A protest rally attracted a crowd of three hundred, with Barack’s close friend Cassandra Butts telling the Harvard Law Record, “I came to law school in particular because I was very much interested in helping people who don’t have access to the law and who see the law as being more of a hindrance than a help to them.”

Students viewed Clark’s move as a tangible, public rebuke of those motives, and quickly created the Emergency Coalition for Public Interest Placement. National legal publications and the Boston Globe all covered the controversy, but the Harvard Crimson highlighted how tiny a percentage of Harvard Law students actually took public interest jobs once they graduated. Butts told the Crimson that many students arrived with such an interest, “but with the emphasis here on corporate law, they don’t always leave with that attitude.” Given the “insurmountable number of loans they need to pay off,” students may “choose to go into corporate work, but they will be more sensitive to the need for pro bono lawyers.” As the fall semester progressed, eight hundred law students signed letters protesting Clark’s move, then dumped them outside the dean’s office during a one-hundred-person rally that the Record said had “an emotional, near confrontational tone.” As Christopher Edley ruefully recalled, Clark “was screwing up massively.”²¹

In late September, Barack flew back to Chicago to take part in a Friday-afternoon roundtable discussion on community organizing. Funded by Ken Rolling and Jean Rudd at Woods, the event built on the commissioned essays Obama and others had written for Illinois Issues a year earlier. Sokoni Karanja, Wieboldt’s Anne Hallett, and several local academics were part of the group, and, as he had in other settings, Barack refrained from talking until the discussion was well under way. When he did speak, Barack highlighted what he called “the educative function of organizing,” for “at some point you have to link up … with the larger trends, larger movements in the city or the country. I think we are not very good at that.” He suggested that “I am not sure we talk enough in organizing” about organizing’s internal culture, and “we don’t understand what the relationship between organizing and politics should be…. I would like to think that ideally you would focus on the local but educate for the broader arena, and that you are creating a base for political or national issues.” Barack expressed disappointment that organizing had a “suspicion of politics,” for “politics is a major arena of power” and “to marginalize yourself from that process is a damaging thing, and one that needs to be rethought.” His critique was fundamental, and strong. “Organizing right now doesn’t have a long-term vision.”

In the 1960s, “a lot was lost during the civil rights movement because there was not enough effective organizing consolidating those gains,” but now organizers were ignoring the potential of working with movement-style efforts, and “that long-term vision needs to be developed.” Barack returned to organizing’s educative mission. “How do you educate people enough so that they can be forcing their politicians to articulate their broader views and wider horizons?” he asked. “People expect politicians to express some long-term interests of theirs and not just appeal to the lowest common denominator.”

Barack sat back before again weighing in. “There is this big slippery slope of folks and communities that are sinking,” he reminded the group. How can organizing help them? “How do you link up some of the most important lessons about organizing … with some powerful messages that came out of the civil rights movement or what Jesse Jackson has done or what’s been done by other charismatic leaders? A whole sense of hope is generated out of what they do. Jesse Jackson can go into these communities and get these people excited and inspired. The organizational framework to consolidate that is missing,” especially given the lack of minority organizers. “The best organizers in the black community right now are the crack dealers. They are fantastic. There’s tremendous entrepreneurship and skill,” all being used to distribute illegal drugs. To help black neighborhoods, “organizing in these communities … can’t just be instrumental … it has to be recreating and recasting how these communities think about themselves.”

After a pause, Barack turned to one of his chief takeaways from his time in Roseland. Harold Washington “was an essentially charismatic leader,” although “his election was an expression of a lot of organizing that had been taking place over a long time.” All indications were that “to a large extent” Washington “wanted to give back to that process. He wanted to give those groups recognition and empower them in some sense,” as he had done so visibly with Mary Ellen Montes and UNO, but “real empowerment was not done.” An African American historian on the panel objected to Barack criticizing Harold Washington. Sokoni Karanja agreed with the angry historian, but Anne Hallett sided with Barack, who pursued his point. “When you have a charismatic leader, whether it’s Jesse Jackson or Harold Washington … there has to be some sort of interaction” that moves all that energy back “into the community to build up more organizing … more of that needs to be done.” Then the conversation shifted, but Obama made one final point: “Organizing can also be a bridge between the private and the public, between politics and people’s everyday lives.”

Barack’s comments revealed how profoundly he disagreed with the worldview of IAF and Greg Galluzzo, and how convinced he was that social change energies should be focused on the political arena. In later years hardly anyone would appreciate the significance of what Obama said that day. Ben Joravsky, a fellow participant who was already on his way to becoming one of Chicago’s most perceptive political journalists, later recalled Obama’s “veneer of cool” but dismissed his comments as those of “a windy sociology professor with nothing particularly insightful to say.” Only journalist John B. Judis, examining this moment many years later, would highlight how Obama had voiced “a litany of criticisms of Alinsky-style organizing” and note that he had “rejected the guiding principles of community organizing: the elevation of self-interest over moral vision; the disdain for charismatic leaders and their movements; and the suspicion of politics itself.” But, Judis wrote, Obama “did so in a way that seemed to elude the other participants,” who objected only to Barack’s remark that Harold Washington had not left behind any tangible political legacy.

Judis mused that even Obama “seemed initially oblivious to the harsh implications of his own words,” but Washington’s fundamental failure should have been obvious to everyone in the room, especially because the mayor’s political base had so quickly fallen apart after his death, leaving Chicago with a white, Democratic machine mayor with an all-too-familiar surname. Six months earlier, Cook County state’s attorney Richard M. Daley had defeated Gene Sawyer in the Democratic primary by 55 to 44 percent, and five weeks later, Daley was elected mayor, besting Alderman Tim Evans, running as an independent, by 55 to 41 percent. Ed Vrdolyak, now a Republican, garnered 3 percent and soon added a sideline as a radio talk show host to his lucrative South Chicago law practice.²²

The Chicago trip was also a chance for Barack to spend a weekend with Michelle Robinson, and either then or soon after, he asked her to accompany him to Honolulu over the winter holidays. Back in Cambridge, Barack kept his distance from the burgeoning student protest campaign, despite his friendship with the outspoken Cassandra Butts, who, second only to Rob Fisher, was his best friend in Cambridge. Laura Jehl, who was working with Cassandra on a manuscript for the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, knew that Barack and Rob were “inseparable,” and she also saw how Barack and Cassandra “were around together a lot but they didn’t appear to be together,” as she put it. “It did not seem to be romantic” and “it did not appear to be sexual.” Another female friend concurred: “the vibe they gave off was fraternal.” Laura thought that as attractive as Barack was, “there was also absolutely no body language of him that I was aware of towards anybody,” and other women all agreed: “I didn’t see any sexual energy from him” said one, and “never any sense” at all, recalls another.

On evenings when Barack worked on the Anthony Cook manuscript at Gannett House, he and fellow 2L African American editor Ken Mack often walked to a sandwich shop in Harvard Square for dinner. On several nights, Gordon Whitman gave Barack a lift home and spoke about how he was volunteering at the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, a Boston group headed by veteran community organizer Lew Finfer. After Barack mentioned his Chicago experience, Whitman told Finfer he should meet him. Finfer called Obama, and they met up one day at a Harvard Square coffee shop. Finfer found Barack “cool” and “dispassionate,” but hoped to interest him in a return to organizing after law school. Barack politely said no. “I have a plan to return to Chicago and go into politics.”

One mid-October night, 3L executive editor Tom Krause, a U.S. Navy veteran who was overseeing the group edit of the Anthony Cook article, hosted a party following a lecture by Alex Kozinski, the well-known federal appellate judge for whom Krause would be clerking after graduation. Krause invited a number of editors of all political persuasions, and Barack attended. Review editors were prized candidates for clerkships with top federal judges like Kozinski, and an astonishing 102 members of the law school’s 1989 graduating class had won clerkships. Each fall 2Ls began eyeing and discussing which jurists they would apply to in the spring, and Ken Mack was astounded when Barack told him one evening that he was so focused on returning to Chicago after graduation that he would forgo applying for clerkships. When this news spread among African American students, there was open disbelief that such a top performer would pass up so prestigious an accolade. Kenny Smith was surprised and impressed, but others sensed an attitude of group disappointment. As Frank Harper put it, there were “these steps you’re supposed to take” and “people thought that he was making a catastrophic error by not clerking.”

Obama was a semiregular presence at BLSA meetings and parties. Cochairing a BLSA committee made him a formal member of BLSA’s executive board, but the group’s style was decidedly informal, with its annual spring conference the one major event requiring time and attendance by its members. After some BLSA gatherings Barack, Ken, and basketball buddies Frank Harper and David Hill would go to a pizza parlor on Mass Ave a bit north of the law school. Often joining them were two new 1Ls. Karla Martin was an African American 1987 Harvard College graduate; Peter Cicchino was white, gay, a year older than Barack, and had spent six years as a lay member of the Jesuits. Cicchino would become a defining member of the school’s public interest community and a landmark figure in the public emergence of gay people at Harvard Law. Karla remembers Barack saying that he “wanted to be a change agent” notwithstanding his absence from student protest ranks. “It was clear he had ambitions,” but “how that was going to play out was not clear.”

Barack continued to spend more time on the basketball court than he did just hanging out. The new 1L class brought some new faces plus a familiar one into Hemenway gym’s late-afternoon mix. Nathan Diament, an honors graduate of Yeshiva University, was short and fast. Greg Dingens had played defensive tackle at Notre Dame and three times won Academic All-American honors before graduating magna cum laude in 1986. Tom Wathen had been NYPIRG’s executive director during Barack’s four-month stint at City College four years earlier. Wathen recalled that they both did “a double-take” when they first saw each other. Compared to early 1985, when Barack was twenty-three years old, he of course seemed “more sophisticated” now at twenty-eight. “I was very impressed with him,” Wathen remembered.

One day early that fall, Frank Harper, cochair of BLSA’s community outreach committee, read a letter sent to the BLSA by Ronald A. X. Stokes, an inmate at Massachusetts’s maximum-security state prison at Walpole, about thirty miles south of Cambridge. According to Harper, Stokes’s message was a challenge: “you black students at Harvard should be ashamed of yourselves. There’s a huge African American prison population; we never see hide nor hair of you.” Harper called him at the prison and then “he calls me collect.” Stokes sounded “very sincere” and mentioned that “we play a lot of basketball at Walpole.”

That gave Harper an idea: “Let’s have a basketball game.” Harper called the warden, who thought, “This is very odd,” but agreed to allow it if Harper could recruit five Harvard players. “Then I approach Barack. ‘This isn’t going to be an easy task,’ ” but they recruited black classmate Andre Nobles, a white Hemenway player, and a black poli sci grad student. A date was set, a van was rented, and when they arrived at Walpole, the warden gave them a stern briefing. “You’re entering general population” and guards “are not going to be down there with you,” only in sentry towers, Harper remembered. “If something happens, go to the corners, because we won’t fire shots in the corners.”

For the inmates, the game was major entertainment. “The entire prison surrounded the court to watch” as “the Walpole All-Stars” hosted five nervous Harvard gym rats. “We had a good team,” Harper recalled, and “it was definitely a competitive game,” at least until halftime. The Harvard players later joked that Obama played well until he asked the inmate who was guarding him what he was in for. “The brother said double murder, and Barack didn’t take another shot,” Harper remembered. “They won the game,” but the inmates were grateful for the students’ visit. Stokes told Harper that “he was getting out” within a few months, and “I stayed in contact with him after the game.”²³

By November, Rob and Barack’s relationship with Larry Tribe had far outstripped the normal research assistants’ role, especially for first semester 2Ls. The lead piece in the Harvard Law Review’s November issue was an essay by Tribe, rather than the annual foreword, and on page one, Tribe’s first footnote stated that “I am grateful to Rob Fisher,” top 3L Michael Dorf, two postgraduates, “and Barack Obama for their analytic and research assistance.” It was a remarkable commendation, and Tribe had already invited Fisher and Obama to enroll in a spring seminar, limited to fifteen students, that would further consider the ideas expressed in his thirty-nine-page Review essay, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics.”

Tribe’s description of the seminar invoked two contrasting conceptions of the U.S. Constitution: first that the original 1787 document was “Newtonian” in its promulgation of three branches, featuring “carefully calibrated forces and counter-forces,” and second, that the twentieth-century idea of an evolving “living Constitution” was Darwinian. Tribe proposed exploring a third conception, one modeled upon the work of physicists Alfred Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, “focusing on how observers alter the nature of what is observed” and considering “the concrete geometry of the space-time continuum.”

As obscure as that might sound, Rob and Barack were hooked after listening to Tribe at a late-October “organizational meeting” that began to sketch out what the selected participants would tackle. Rob wrote to Tribe that he had a “particular interest in … [t]he nature of the enterprise itself, that is, Law: This is the main focus of my thinking right now. Barack and I have been working on a meta-theory of the law—let’s call it post-modern epistemology. (Though Barack hasn’t seen this memo, so don’t blame him for anything in it.) I will be looking at the Constitution as both a test for and an inspiration to that meta-theory … the role I see it potentially playing in the seminar is as a gadfly to your physics metaphor” but “not necessarily inconsistent” with it. It was no wonder that classmates marveled at Barack’s “esoteric discussions” with Tribe and felt that he and Rob “were leagues beyond the rest of us.”

At the Law Review, editing work continued on the dense Anthony Cook article, which would not be published until March. The November issue that featured Tribe’s essay also contained the traditional foreword, authored by Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of Southern California, and case comment, by Frances Olsen of the University of California at Los Angeles. One 3L editor had been hugely impressed by Chemerinsky, a mesmerizingly intense speaker, and successfully lobbied for his selection for that prized role. Olsen was a well-known feminist scholar who had published a major article in the Review six years earlier. Her piece had undergone a very difficult edit, including the editors’ insistence that the Review would not publish the word “bitch.” As 2L editor Susan Freiwald, who witnessed one exchange, said, Olsen’s experience at the “P-read” stage exemplified how Review president Peter Yu “thought he was smarter than everyone else, including professors.” Yet as 3L Articles Office cochair Andy Schapiro stressed, the perception that Yu was indeed “the smartest” had been the decisive factor in his election as president nine months earlier. Editor Pauline Wan, a 3L, agreed. “People wanted to elect the smartest person in the room,” and “everyone felt Peter was the smartest person in the room.”

But Yu’s presidency was getting decidedly mixed reviews. During the summer, he had overseen the installation of a new computer system for the Review, but as the fall commenced, tensions grew. Chad Oldfather, who worked up to twenty hours a week at the Review as a work-study undergrad, remembered Yu as “not a warm and fuzzy guy,” and 3L editor Barbara Schneider realized that he was “not a people person.” Pauline Wan found him “remote,” and Brad Berenson, one of the most involved 2L editors, felt Yu was “a slightly aloof figure.” Kevin Downey, an active 2L, thought Peter was “not at all approachable” and “not a good leader.” Supreme Court Office cochair Frank Cooper, one of four African American 3Ls, viewed Peter as “a quiet intellectual who was focused on the academic rigor” of each issue, but “he was not even a quiet leader.”

Yu had a particularly strained relationship with Articles Office cochairs Gordon Whitman and Andy Schapiro, both of whom were lefty-liberals, in part over their selection of articles like the one by Anthony Cook. Susan Freiwald remembered Yu editing one piece and remarking that “every good idea in here comes from me.” But Freiwald thought Yu’s interactions with Frances Olsen were inexcusable, that he was “intellectually beating up” on her. During one loud, angry phone exchange, Freiwald remembers Yu “just screaming at her and her screaming back,” and it left Freiwald thinking that “Peter was an asshole.”

As the editing of the Cook manuscript proceeded, more and more of the work fell to Christine Lee. Articles Office member David Goldberg, a 2L, realized the piece “was way too long” and “a little jargony,” and fellow 2L editor John Parry saw that Christine “worked very hard” and “reorganized it, and I think made it coherent.” Christine willingly put in lots of time, but as the semester progressed, she concluded that Barack was more interested in playing basketball than doing his share of the necessary sub-citing and other work on the Cook manuscript. “We were a team,” but “he would play basketball religiously, including when there was a sub-cite due,” Christine remembered. “He definitely did the bare minimum,” and “it was just building my resentment” as “other people were covering for the drudge work he wasn’t doing.”

Executive editor Tom Krause noted that at the outset, “Barack was like the primary editor,” but “somehow it kind of was taken over by Christine, who ended up doing all the work.” Krause was not a fan of the article, but in his eyes, Christine, “to the detriment of her own grades and class work, was doing work he”—Obama—“could have been doing.” As the piece moved forward, Krause stepped up his own involvement, and he and Christine—polar political opposites—became personally close “doing the things that Barack had not done,” Christine recalled. In retrospect, even Gordon Whitman, Cook’s main proponent, realized the article was “pretty impenetrable.” Krause thought “it would have been worse if Christine and I hadn’t worked on it,” but Whitman’s verdict was appropriately biting: “In hindsight, what the hell was that all about?”

The real meat of each November issue was the individual case comments, which were anonymously authored by 3L editors. The 1989 issue surveyed twenty-five Supreme Court decisions, which brought the issue to a robust 404 pages. This earned Peter Yu a stern rebuke from Erwin Griswold: “I would like to suggest that one of the major tasks of the President is to edit out vast quantities of unnecessary words, and to keep the overall size of each issue, and of the volume, under control.” Yu responded that he shared that concern, but he cited “the extraordinary number of leading cases from this past Term” and promised that the entire volume would not be any larger than in years past.

Griswold replied that he was “not wildly enthusiastic about” the Tribe essay; “essentially the same arguments can be made without any … farfetched allusions to concepts developed in the field of physics.” In contrast, Griswold found Chemerinsky’s foreword “both interesting and powerful” and thought Olsen’s comment was “imaginative and stimulating.” He thought some of the case comments were “very good,” but “surely much too wordy.” Griswold was happy that the December issue, at 196 pages, would be less than half the size, but again he said the sole article, a 105-page piece on statutory interpretation, was “awfully wordy.” A thirty-one-page review of a book by philosopher Richard Rorty was “much too long” and “quite indigestible,” a “depressing” example of something “written by a professor for the professors” rather than for “active, practicing lawyers.”

Griswold was happy with the two six-page “Recent Cases” summaries, one of which, by Barack’s basketball buddy Tom Perrelli, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of Brown, exemplified how 2L editors were expected to do at least one brief piece of individual writing in addition to their pool or team assignments. Barack may not have been doing his share of the work on the Cook edit, but by late October, he was well under way writing a comment on a late 1988 decision by the Illinois Supreme Court, which held that a young child injured in an auto accident while she was still a fetus cannot sue her mother for monetary damages. Laurence Tribe was completing work on a book surveying the ongoing U.S. political debate over abortion, and Barack was one of more than a dozen of his research assistants whom Tribe had asked to read and summarize relevant materials.

Barack mentioned the case comment he was writing to his mother at the same time he told her that, unlike the previous year’s Christmas holiday, he was coming to Honolulu and Michelle Robinson was coming with him. Maya had not returned to Barnard for her sophomore year and had joined her mother in Jakarta before returning to Honolulu, where she was waitressing at a restaurant. Barack had not seen his mother, who was now forty-six years old, since Christmas 1987, when he had taken Sheila Jager to Hawaii to meet his family. Just after he started at Harvard, Ann had moved back to Jakarta to take a job at the People’s Bank of Indonesia—Bank Rakyat Indonesia, or BRI—the country’s oldest financial institution and one specializing in microfinance, small loans to artisans and retailers. Ann had lost interest in completing her long-delayed dissertation, telling her old friend Julia Suryakasuma that “the creative part was over long ago, and it’s just a matter of finishing the damn thing.”

But her new work put her in direct contact with the people whose artisanal pursuits she had devoted her fieldwork to studying. Ann also had begun a fulfilling relationship with Made Suarjana, a married journalist eighteen years her junior, and in November, she wrote to Alice Dewey, her longtime mentor, to tell her that she would be returning to Honolulu for the holiday. She told Dewey that Maya’s time in Indonesia “seems to have done her a lot of good, unstressed her and renewed her self-confidence” after a rocky first year at Barnard. “Barry is also coming at Christmas with a new girlfriend in tow. He is still enjoying law school and writing pro-choice opinions of the abortion issue for the Law Review.”

No matter what Barack told his mother about his case comment, which went to press in early December, its pro-choice stance was extremely measured. The Illinois court had defended its holding on the grounds that otherwise the mother and her fetus would be “legal adversaries from the moment of conception until birth.” Obama commended the court for its “thoughtful approach” and wrote that the case “highlights the unsuitability of fetal-maternal tort suits as vehicles for promoting fetal health.” He said the suit “also indicates the dangers such causes of action present to women’s autonomy, and the need for a constitutional framework to constrain future attempts to expand ‘fetal rights,’ ” because “fetal-maternal tort suits affect even more fundamental interests of bodily integrity and privacy” on the part of women. He wrote that the state may have “a more compelling interest in ensuring that fetuses carried to term do not suffer from debilitating injuries than it does in ensuring that any particular fetus is born,” but again stressed the primacy of “women’s interests in autonomy and privacy.” Obama concluded the piece by recommending that “expanded access to prenatal education and health care facilities will far more likely serve the very real state interest in preventing increasing numbers of children from being born into lives of pain and despair.”²⁴

Before fall classes ended on December 8, two Chicagoans visited the law school. Elvin Charity, a 1979 Harvard Law graduate who had worked for Harold Washington, was now one of two black partners at the Chicago law firm of Hopkins & Sutter. Charity was on his firm’s recruiting committee “to help to promote the hiring of African-American lawyers,” and Harvard was an annual target. Second-year students traditionally split their summers between a pair of firms, and although Barack would return to Sidley & Austin for part of the upcoming summer, Hopkins & Sutter was another attractive Chicago firm. To Charity, “Barack was particularly striking” in part because he showed up for his interview “pretty casually dressed,” rather than in a suit and tie. “He just seemed so nonchalant about the whole thing,” with “a calmness and a seeming maturity beyond his years.” Charity knew the significance of Barack’s Law Review membership, but Obama “did not seem to be full of himself” and an offer was quickly extended and accepted.

The second Chicago visitor was Michelle Robinson, who along with an Asian American colleague was there on behalf of Sidley to speak to minority 1Ls about job search techniques at an evening session sponsored by all three ethnic—black, Latino, and Asian—student groups. Several ’91 and ’92 BLSA women who had heard Barack talk about Michelle realized this would be a perfect opportunity to “go see who this person is,” and “we were very impressed with her,” Jan-Michele Lemon remembered. “She was very engaging and warm and friendly.”

Michelle’s Wednesday visit came just two days before the end of classes, and the next Monday Barack faced the first of three fall semester final exams. Upper-class exams took place in December, not mid-January, but Barack had Edley’s Ad Law and Tribe’s Con Law take-homes back-to-back on the first two days of exam period. Edley’s emphasized that “it is important to demonstrate that you have synthesized the assigned readings and course materials,” and students had to answer six out of nine questions, with responses limited to 150 to 500 words apiece.

Tribe’s open-book final posed just one essay question, with answers limited to 1,750 words. The hypothetical situation involved an abortion clinic employee who had been fired for telling a woman the sex of her fetus. The woman then aborted the fetus, citing avowedly religious reasons, because it was female. The fired employee had been denied unemployment benefits, and Tribe’s hypothetical played off a recently argued U.S. Supreme Court case, Employment Division v. Smith, which also involved a state’s refusal of unemployment benefits to a worker fired because of religion-based conduct. Tribe asked students to write their best decision of the case. Six days later, on December 18, Barack and Rob had their last fall exam, for Kraakman’s Corporations class. Then Barack was free to head to Honolulu, though upper-class students’ single winter session course would begin promptly on Tuesday, January 2.²⁵

Barack’s introduction of Michelle Robinson to Ann, Toot, Gramps, and Maya signified, just like Sheila’s visit two Christmases earlier, how serious this six-month-old relationship was. After Michelle’s early December visit to Harvard, “it was clear that they were ‘a couple,’ ” her close Sidley friend Kelly Jo MacArthur recalled, and “the discussions turned fairly soon to whether they were going to get married or not.” That clearly came up during their time together in Honolulu, because soon after they flew back to the mainland, Ann Dunham sent her close Indonesian friend Julia Suryakusuma a description of Michelle. “She is intelligent, very tall (6'1"), not beautiful but quite attractive. She did her BA at Princeton and her law degree at Harvard. But she has spent most of her life in Chicago,” so she was “a little provincial and not as international as Barry. She is nice, though, and if he goes ahead and marries her after he finishes law school, I will have no objections.”

Almost the first day he returned to Cambridge, Barack wrote to Sheila Jager, who two months earlier had returned to the U.S. from South Korea. Barack had written to Sheila regularly throughout her time abroad, once sending her a short story he had written and another time “an annotated copy of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.” By the time she returned, Sheila had told Barack she had applied for and won a Harvard teaching fellowship in Asian Studies with the eminent scholar Ezra Vogel. Before the end of January, Sheila would be moving to Cambridge and renting an apartment at 5 Crawford Street. She recalled that “the job at Harvard had nothing to do with Barack being there, per se, although I can’t rule out that I unconsciously applied to Harvard to be near him.” But she also explained, “Then again, I wasn’t going to turn down a job there simply because he was there,” and during their time apart, she had begun a relationship with someone else.