Kozlowski and Cloobeck remembered how captivated Fisher and Obama were with Rosenberg, and Ali Rubin thought that “from the beginning Rosenberg treated Rob and Barack differently” than other students. Cloobeck believed Obama spoke just as much in Torts as he did in Crim, demonstrating to all how “incredibly, intensely smart and thoughtful” he was, even relative to classmates who had graduated at the top of their classes from the nation’s best colleges and universities. Obama was “intellectually curious” and “sincere in his academic passion,” Cloobeck thought, but he also seemed “extremely arrogant, very conceited.” Yet he admitted that Barack and Rob spoke “at a level that was just beyond my comprehension.”
David Rosenberg remembered Barack as “one of the most serious students I’ve ever encountered.” Rosenberg’s approach to Torts involved “applying social and natural science to social problems” in a heavily economic, functionalist manner. He recalls that “Obama and Fisher were determined to figure out what was going on, absolutely determined.” The two came by his office “almost twice or three times a week, not to talk about the course in ways that would translate into a better grade, but to talk about the actual problems that I was raising and the approach.” Rob and Barack were always together—“you couldn’t separate them,” Rosenberg explains—but “they weren’t a duo in their mind-sets,” and “it didn’t seem like one was dependent on the other. They were quite independent,” and always raising “social policy questions” when they came by. Rosenberg remembered that in class, Obama “asked good questions, he fought through hard problems. I thought he was going to be a top academic.”
Rob remembered that “Barack was very active” in Torts and “loved that class.” Rosenberg “met argument with argument, and valued creativity,” and “Barack and I just had a great time in that class. We were constantly arguing and talking and enjoying it and going to visit Rosenberg,” and Torts overall was “an absolute blast.” Rosenberg “had this intense intellectual passion” and a “creative style of lawyering that greatly appealed to us both.” Rob believes that “Rosenberg had a vastly bigger influence on Barack’s and my thinking about law” than their other 1L instructors combined.
Four years earlier, Rosenberg had published a major article in the Harvard Law Review calling for a restructuring of tort litigation in mass exposure cases like asbestos through the courts’ use of “aggregative procedural and remedial techniques,” an argument he revisited in a shorter 1986 HLR essay. In fall 1988, Rosenberg was writing an additional commentary, calling for “collective processing” and comprehensive settlements in mass tort cases rather than “legislative insurance schemes.” He was already so impressed by Rob and Barack that he sought their input on his draft manuscript. When it was published in May 1989, the first page included thanks to Rob and Barack for their “substantive criticism and editorial advice,” a remarkable acknowledgment for a Harvard law professor to bestow upon two 1L students.7
Amy Christian remembered a day in Torts when “one of Barack’s two front teeth was broken diagonally so that like half the tooth was gone,” a casualty from the previous afternoon’s basketball game, he told her. “A couple of classes later he came in, and his tooth looked totally normal.” Kenny Smith, a 2L, remembered Barack as “a good player,” but two recollections of Obama from among the wider population of classmates who went up against him either in intramural matchups or the almost daily pickup games were his penchant for “trash talk” insults to opposing players and his tendency to call “baby” fouls in self-refereed games. Barack “was cocky as a basketball player, he was not as a regular person,” 1L Brad Wiegmann thought. Martin Siegel recalled “being in a game with him where he called a foul” and “he just headed to the other end of the court.” Oftentimes, “being a law school, if people called fouls there was a tendency to have that devolve into a crazy argument.” Not so with Obama. In “a sign of his status,” everyone “followed him without objection. It was as if he had said it, and therefore it was so.”
Greg Sater had formed a volleyball league, and their court time was just after basketball, but the basketball players would refuse to give up the floor. “They would always give me shit,” Sater recalled, and then Barack would “sweet-talk me into giving them an extra few minutes, always.” He was “very disarming” and “very good at defusing situations and being a peacemaker.” Rob Fisher had similar memories from pickup basketball games, but they spent far more time studying than on the basketball court.
The press of coursework led Barack to give up on the irregular journal he had kept ever since his first year in New York, and he and Rob often studied at his Somerville apartment rather than in Harvard’s law library. Rob remembers that Barack was very proud of “three Filipino gun cases,” big long wooden boxes he had bought to serve as bookshelves, but otherwise the “apartment was very sparse,” with “a little TV,” some “spare furniture,” and overall an “ascetic” feeling. “He and I would sit around his apartment,” Rob recalled, “and just bang ideas back and forth for hours.”
Rob appreciated that Barack was “very much a synthetic thinker,” just as other classmates had sensed from his many summary expositions, and Rob realized as well that virtually everyone around them “recognized from the start” that Barack was “exceptional.” Rob understood that Barack’s time in Chicago had been “an extraordinary experience for him,” and although Rob has no memory of any such conversation, one of his closest friends vividly remembers a phone call early in Rob’s time at Harvard in which Rob said he had just met the first African American president of the United States.
“Barack and I both looked at law school as an intellectual playground, a place to develop ideas, to have fun with ideas,” Rob explained. “There is no question, when he was in law school, his path in his mind was to be a politician. That is where he was going, and that was crystal clear from day one of law school,” along with definitely returning to Chicago upon graduation. During their conversations, Rob learned that “Barack recognized he had exceptional talents, and that that was a gift from God, that was something special.” Barack “felt a great moral obligation to use” his “special gifts” to “help people … and that was very palpable, very real, and very deep.” Just as Sheila Jager had heard Barack speak about his destiny, Rob too understood that Barack had a sense of himself that was rooted in his experiences in Roseland. “The way he described it to me,” Rob recalled, during “long deep conversations … he pictured an elderly African American woman sitting on a porch and just saying to him, ‘Barack, you’ve got special gifts. You need to use them for people.’ That was a very deep-seated belief. There’s no question about that,” even in the fall of 1988. Rob also knew that Barack’s identification as black “was a choice,” and that “making choices about identity did limit personal choices, and that pained him.”
Barack “spent so much time together” with Cassandra “Sandy” Butts that a mutual friend explained how “everybody thought they were dating, even though I don’t think that was ever the case.” As Jackie Fuchs forthrightly put it, voicing a perception widely shared among female classmates, Barack “gave off zero sexuality…. He came off as completely asexual.” His relationship with Sandy, who was four years younger and whose parents had divorced before she was a year old, had an older brother–younger sister closeness.
“When I first met Barack, I thought he was this black guy from the Midwest, and he did not volunteer his background, other than coming from Chicago,” Cassandra explained. “I didn’t know that Barack’s mother was white until a couple of weeks into knowing him. It wasn’t something that he volunteered.” Sandy was interested in Africa and had visited Zimbabwe and Botswana as an undergraduate, and only after Barack mentioned his trip to Kenya did his family story emerge: “My mother is white.” Like Rob, Sandy also soon realized that Barack’s years in Chicago had been “the most formative”