Well, it must be a slow news time, end of June and all that, because there's more talk of Barack Obama's term as president of the Harvard Law Review in politico, via abovethelaw. As I said back in February when talk of limited citations to the volume that Obama oversaw surfaced, I think there's a lot more important stuff to look at.
I don't think the authors of the politico piece (Jeffrey Ressner and Ben Smith) completely figured out the law review. Let's start with this: they talk about articles in the first few issues (which they mistakenly call volumes) that appeared while Obama was president. Anthony Cook's article on Martin Luther King (which appeared in March 1990) was selected well before Obama became president. (As I understand it, Obama was elected president in February 1990 and his term ended in spring 1991.) Similarly, the responses to Randall Kennedy's "Racial Critiques of Legal Academia" that appeared in the June 1990 issue were almost certainly selected before Obama became president.
There are some other oddities in the piece--like attributing the abstract to Ian Ayres' piece on the market for car sales--to the editors of the law review. They say:
Obama's last issue contains one of its most sharply liberal pieces, a study of race and gender in car sales, which, the editors say in an equally liberal introduction, provides "evidence that seriously challenge faith in the ability of competitive market forces to eliminate racial and gender discrimination in other markets" and calls for more government action. (emphasis added)
I'm guessing that the Ayres wrote the abstract, rather than the editors--in fact, I'd be shocked if they did. But let's assume that they did; they're summarizing Ayres' thesis.
There's an important cautionary tale in here for historians--journalists may not get the story exactly right and we should be cautious about their reports.
One thing they dug up--and this probably isn't surprising and it's consistent with other evidence about Senator Obama--he was, even as a law student, a good listener and, consequently, a good politician. I think that's a quality that's in short supply, but I sure wouldn't base my vote for a president primarily or even secondarily on what happened nearly twenty years ago when he was a law student, good or bad.
Still, let's look on the bright side! Those who look to the Harvard Law Review as evidence of the mind of the people who published it are engaging in a time-honored practice of intellectual historians. (See also this piece.) If you want to know something about the intellect of a people, look at their literary output--and that's precisely what I try to do in a series of studies of citations to law journals! It's a nice confirmation of my area of research, which takes seriously the ideas in circulation in the academy in the antebellum era.
Here's a January 2007 article on Obama's tenure, which is where I got the photograph.
Update: I talk about Obama's "lost" law review "article" here.
Comments