Obama and Law Review Trivia

Here's  a light post for a snowy Sunday evening in March.  (Four inches of snow in Tuscaloosa?  Almost unheard of, especially in March....)  I'm going to combine two great loves of law professors in this post about a trivia question: law reviews and President Obama!  Who was the first person to cite Obama in a law review?  

(Actually, close readers of the faculty lounge will recall that I've written about this before, but it was buried at the bottom of a very long post on Laurence Tribe's article on "Curvatures of Constitutional Space," for which Obama served as a research assistant.)

The answer is below the fold....

Alfreda Diamond Sellers--in an essay review of Gregory Howard Williams' Life on the Color Line in the Mississippi Law Journal in 1997 (volume 57, beginning at page 427).  She cited Dreams from My Father.

Although a purist might say that the citation to Obama's anonymous "lost" law review article (actually a case comment) counts as a citation to him.  (I was thinking when I asked the question about the first citation that named him.)  And the distinction for the first citation to his Harvard Law Review case comment in a United States law review seems to go to Sandra L. Haley in the University of Richmond Law Review in March 1996 in a comment entitled "The Parental Tort Immunity Doctrine: Is It a Defensible Defense?" (volume 30, beginning at page 575).  There was an earlier citation an article, co-authored by Sheilah Martin of the University of Calgary and Murray Coleman of the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, in the McGill Law Journal in March 1995.