David Shapiro’s Civ Pro course was Section III’s most vanilla class, but most students thought Shapiro was an excellent, witty teacher. Classmates and Shapiro recall Obama speaking only irregularly in Civ Pro, but they do remember him as one of the most talkative voices in Richard Parker’s Crim Law classroom. Parker had “a class discussion” style that stood in contrast to Macneil’s classic Socratic method, recalls Kenneth Mack, one of Section III’s other African American men. Mack thought Barack was a standout presence from the first week of class. “He was a striking figure,” Mack said. “He spoke very well, and very eloquently,” and seemed “older and wiser than the three years that separated our birth dates…. It seemed like I was twenty-four, and Barack was thirty-four,” like Rob Fisher. “He and Rob seemed like they were the same age.” Shannon Schmoyer agreed: Barack “just seemed so much more mature” than most other 1Ls.
Parker was an entertaining teacher, and having Peter Larrowe, a former police officer, in the class sometimes added a bracing dose of reality to discussions. Several students recalled Parker saying, “If you’re going to a protest, always take your toothbrush,” and Lisa Hay’s Three Speech recorded one exchange after Larrowe mentioned his background to Parker: “ ‘Does everyone know that you were a police officer?’ ‘They do now…. No more undercover work,’ ” Larrowe joked. Fisher also vividly remembered Parker querying students about their own experiences with police officers and one attractive woman describing how she was patted down outside a bar. “How did that make you feel?” Parker asked. “Oh, it was kind of nice,” she replied as the entire class erupted in laughter.
Sarah Leah Whitson remembered Obama once making some real-world rather than doctrinal point in a colloquy with Parker, and Richard Cloobeck recalled a similar scene where Barack “spoke from the black perspective in Crim class because something had happened to him where he’d experienced racial discrimination in profiling, and it was very personal.” Sherry Colb, valedictorian of Columbia’s 1988 graduating class and Section III’s most loquacious female voice, remembered that when the subject of acquaintance rape came up in class, Barack expressed displeasure with what others had said. “ ‘I don’t even understand why we’re debating this. Why is silence enough? Why aren’t people looking for “yes”?’ ” Sherry recalled Barack asking. “I think the women in the class really appreciated that because there were other males in the class who took a more reactionary position.”
Sima Sarrafan, an Iranian American honors graduate of Vassar College, realized that Obama “had a more pragmatic view of the law” than most classmates or professors. Roger Boord, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of the University of Virginia, remembered Barack as “this voice of authority … his voice was like Walter Cronkite.” But especially in Parker’s class, Barack, David Troutt, and Sherry Colb spoke up so regularly that it generated irritation and derision from some fellow students. Most Section III students spoke only when asked to. “The last thing I ever wanted would be to be called upon,” Greg Sater explained. “Most of my friends were the same way, and we would never in a million years ever raise our hand.”
In stark contrast, Section III’s most self-confident voices, or “gunners,” in longtime law student parlance, raised their hands almost every day in participatory classes like Richard Parker’s. Dozens of Obama’s classmates remember him consistently waiting until a discussion’s latter part before he chimed in, with comments that he thought synthesized what others had said. “He never really took a very strong, argumentative position,” Ali Rubin recalled. Dozens laughingly recalled his insistent usage of the word “folks” as well as his regular introductory refrain of “It’s my sense” or “My sense is,” phrases that DCP members remembered hearing regularly during his time in Chicago. Barack “particularly loved to engage with Professor Parker,” Haverford College graduate Lisa Paget recalled. She has a “vivid” memory of Barack remarking, “Professor Parker, I think what the folks here are trying to say is” so as “to synthesize what other people were saying.” Barack “clearly liked to speak,” but “sometimes people got frustrated because they didn’t feel like they needed him” to speak for them. “ ‘Say what your own thinking is, don’t tell him what we’re thinking!’ ”
Decades later, particularly for classmates who had become jurists or prominent attorneys, recollections of just how intensely irritating Obama’s classroom performance had been were burnished with good humor. But even though he was always prepared, always articulate, and always on target, many fellow students tired of Obama’s need to orate. Barack “spoke in complete paragraphs,” Jennifer Radding recalled, but “he often got hissed by us because sometimes we would all make comments” and then “he would raise his hand and say ‘I think what my colleagues are trying to say if I might sum up,’ and we’d be like ‘We can speak for ourselves—shut the fuck up!’ ” Radding thought Obama was “a formal person, reserved” but “always friendly.” Yet “I’m not sure he related to women as well on a colleague basis” as he did with older male friends like Rob, Mark Kozlowski, and Dan Rabinovitz, a former community organizer interested in politics. Jennifer remembered Barack asking Rob and Dan substantive questions, and “then he’d ask me did I party over the weekend.” One day “I called him on it, and I just said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re someone who’s so liberal, and so women’s rights, and you talk to women like they’re not on the same level.’ It horrified him to hear that,” and “I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.”
The joking about Obama’s classroom performance intensified as the fall semester progressed. One classmate, Jerry Sorkin, christened him “The Great Obama” because “he had kind of a superior attitude,” Sorkin’s friend David Attisani remembered. “Barack would start a lot of his speeches with the words ‘My sense is,’ and Jerry would walk around kind of stroking his chin saying ‘My sense is.’ ” Gina Torielli recalled that when Obama or especially Sherry Colb raised their hands to speak, more than a few of the younger men would “take out their watches to start timing how long” they talked. In time it became a competitive game, one played at many law schools over multiple generations, and often called “turkey bingo,” in which irritated classmates wager a few dollars on how long different gunners would exchange comments with the professor. Section III named its contest “The Obamanometer,” Greg Sater recalled, for it measured “how long he could talk.” But Sater explained how there “was a great feeling of relief to all of us whenever he would raise his hand because that would take time off the clock and would lower the chances of us being called upon.”
No one questioned the value of what Barack, Sherry, or David Troutt had to say, but much of Section III got tired of hearing the same voices day after day. With Barack, Greg said, “we were envious of him in many ways because of his intellect,” self-confidence, and poise, but that did not stop the Obamanometer. “We’d kind of look at each other and tap our watch,” he recalled. “You might raise five fingers,” predicting that long a disquisition, “and then your buddy might raise seven.” Jackie Fuchs remembered the label a little differently, explaining that students would “judge how pretentious someone’s remarks are in class by how high they rank on the Obamanometer.”6
Criminal Law was the course in which Barack “pontificated”—as Jackie called it—the most, but the class and professor that Barack and Rob found the most intellectually stimulating was Torts, with David Rosenberg. With only one-third of Section III’s students in that subsection, it was more intimate than Contracts, Civ Pro, or Crim, and the forty-five students responded enthusiastically to Rosenberg’s high-energy, in-your-face style and tough-minded libertarian economics. Everyone remembered Rosenberg’s invitation to a 6:30 A.M. law library tour, when he would discuss the practicalities of thorough legal research. Amy Christian, Richard Cloobeck, Diana Derycz, and Barack were among the half dozen or so students who showed up, and Three Speech recounted Rosenberg insisting during it, “I