Ah, how could I have missed this?! Now, from the folks over at politico who wrote about Obama as president of the Harvard Law Review, we have "Obama's Lost Law Review Article." Just as with politico's last piece on Obama's term as president of the law review--which didn't quite get law review right--this one's a little off the mark, I think. (I wrote about the first piece back in June.)
Start with this: it's a casenote, not an article. He was summarizing a rather strange opinion in the Illinois Supreme Court about whether a child could sue for injuries sustained in a car accident before birth. The child basically wanted some money from the mother's car insurance company.
Some people have taken this up as further proof that Obama supports abortion rights. Might as well say he supports insurance companies, which is the more practical and immediate implication of the case. By the way, Obama's piece is called "Tort Law - Prenatal Injuries - Supreme Court of Illinois Refuses to Recognize Cause of Action Brought by Fetus Against Its Mother for Unintentional Infliction of Prenatal Injuries, Stallman v. Youngquist. 125 Ill. 2d 267, 531 N.E. 2d. 355 (1988)," 103 Harvard Law Review 823. That's a mouthful, ain't it? (Available at Hein-On-Line here and to non-Hein subscribers, here, courtesy of Paul Caron) Obama did offer a little (very little) of his own opinion about the balancing of the mother's autonomy and privacy against the child, but I think it's hard to draw much of an inference from this six page piece.
But here's something else I chuckle about in the title of the politico piece--the "lost" part. Ah, what a way to think about student casenotes. Even in that most prestigious of places, the Harvard Law Review, they're easy to "lose"! But really, other than a few law review geeks (and law professors), who cares? Well, apparently some reporters. Further evidence that we're drawing inferences about a person's mind from his writings. Hey, this is core history of the book material.
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