AMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 23 — The peers who elected Barack Obama as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review say he was a natural leader, an impressive student, a nice guy. But in the 1990 Revue — the graduating editors’ gleeful parody of their elite publication — they said quite a bit more.“I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman,” a mock self-tribute begins. “My mother was a backup singer for Abba. They were good folks.” In Chicago, “I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since.”
After his election, the Faux-bama says, he united warring students into “a happy, cohesive folk,” while “empowering all the folks out there in America who didn’t know about me by giving a series of articulate and startlingly mature interviews to all the folks in the media.”
Read the whole interesting article here.
Couple of comments about Obama and the Harvard Law Review:
ReplyDelete1. Obama was not chosen because of his grades. (Anyone know his GPA while at Harvard?).
Because of the racial turmoil going on a Harvard at the time, Obama was most likely chosen because of his race. AS the NY Times notes:
"...Mr. Obama was the most prominent minority student on a campus shaken by racial politics. A group agitating for greater faculty diversity occupied the dean’s office and sued the school for discrimination; Derrick Bell, a black law professor, resigned over the issue."
2. The President of the Harvard Law Review is expected to write papers for the Review - Obama never did.
Writing no papers for the Law Review is like taking a class in gymnastics without even putting on your leotards to work out. The whole reason for existence of the Review is to write a paper. And yet the very President of it writes none.
3. The president of the law review usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a judge on the Federal Court of Appeals for a year, and then as a clerk for an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
Obama did not. No judge invited him to a clerkship.
ALL Harvard Law Review presidents serve for judges after graduation.
NO judge, not one, not a single one, offered a clerkship to Obama. It wasn't because Obama wasn't free for the asking. As he made clear in his statement upon accepting the position of President of the Review, Obama eagerly made his availability known by declaring that he would be practicing law for 'two or three' years after leaving Harvard. I.e., he was open for the clerk's position. Except - no judge gave it to him. None.
LOL at the above comment. Way to spend all that time writing a response that is completely wrong. Try and do some research next time before you start typing.
ReplyDelete1) Obama graduated magna cum laude from HLS. That should tell you what his GPA was.
2) The Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review rarely writes "papers" for the Review. Legal academics generally write the articles and editors will write notes supplementing this, if anything.
3) Spend 2 minutes on Google, please. First article from Googling "Obama Clerkship" = http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1197453881020. Direct quote, found 15 seconds later: ""He had a lot of chutzpah, doing what he did," recalled Abner Mikva, who actively pursued Obama as a possible clerk when he was chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit."
- You fail.