Does Professor Obama = President Obama?

In case you missed it, Jodi Kantor had an article in the New York Times over the weekend, in which she interviewed former colleagues and students of President Barack Obama in order to gain insight into his potential Supreme Court nominations.  According to Kantor, those who knew Obama as a professor “have a fairly strong sense of the kind of justice he will favor: not a larger-than-life liberal to counter the conservative pyrotechnics of Justice Antonin Scalia but a careful pragmatist with a limited view of the role of courts.” 

Perhaps that assessment is right, but I think we should be cautious in predicting Obama’s judicial nomination strategy based on his exchanges as a professor. 

Such extrapolation raises two questions.                                        

First, how perceptive are students at sizing up their professors?  Students certainly spend a lot of time trying to figure out what makes their professors tick, in hopes of gaining an edge on exams and papers, but also out of pure curiosity.  However, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are very good at it.  I’ve had students absolutely certain that I was liberal, conservative, gay, straight, widowed, Christian, Jewish, and the owner of an Aston Martin (I wish), among other things.  Maybe, Obama’s students were uniquely endowed, but I have my doubts.

Second, are people consistent across situations?  As I have written about in work with the Project on Law and Mind Sciences, there is much social science evidence to suggest that they often are not. 

Being President of the United States presents a completely different array of pressures, constraints, responsibilities, expectations, and freedoms than being a professor at the University of Chicago.  Obama will no doubt draw upon his experiences leading “students through landmark cases from Plessy v. Ferguson to Bush v. Gore” and “editing articles by eminent legal scholars on the court’s decisions,” but it seems imprudent to presume that we can read the tea leaves of these interactions to forecast whether it will be Sonia or Elena who gets the first robe.

Comments

[Alfred]

Very thoughtful post--thanks for this. Can we draw any inference about President Obama's method of selection based on other appointments he's made? I didn't think that Senator Biden would be Obama's vice-presidential pick, for instance. (Which may suggest that he'll go in a different direction from what the "conventional wisdom" thinks. It may also suggest what he values in a nominee?)

[Jacqueline Lipton]

Great post. I read the article over the weekend and was actually perplexed by something else. I thought that Obama was only an adjunct professor at U Chicago, but in the article there's a photograph of him sitting at a desk in his faculty office there. Does U Chicago give faculty offices to adjuncts, or was he a visitor or more permanent faculty member? I've read both of his books, but I couldn't remember if he was very clear on that point.

[Howard Wasserman]

My understanding is that he was a full-time faculty member, just not on the tenure track. He was teaching 1L classes (one of my friends had him for Con Law), which he obviously would not do as an adjunct.

[Adam Benforado]

It’s an interesting question whether we can gain insight into Obama’s likely Supreme Court picks from his other appointments. On a certain level, this seems a more promising route than delving into his time as a professor and I don’t doubt that choosing Joe Biden as VP and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State reveals something about Obama’s approach/values/etc. The problem is that Supreme Court appointments are so different from anything else: among other things, the appointments are for life; after confirmation, appointees are not subject to continued “control” by the President; and the appointments tend to occur outside of the direct context of an election. These are all powerful factors that significantly alter the playing field . . . In any case, I look forward to seeing how this all unfolds!