“Michelle I distinctly remember saying, ‘I cannot see him. Will you please make sure you can see him?’ ” Levi remembered. He did, and “I was wowed” by Obama. “I thought he was phenomenal. He was one of the best interviews I’ve ever had, really.” He recalls that Obama demonstrated “poise and sparkle” and clearly was “a compelling person.” Geri Alexis had a similar reaction. “I remember very vividly” speaking with Barack. “He impressed me so much that I called down to the recruiting office, and I said, ‘We really need to give this guy an offer before he leaves the building,’ and they said, ‘Well, we don’t do that for 1Ls,’ and I said, ‘You’re going to do it for this one,’ ” and they did.
John Levi concurred. “I called Michelle later in the day and said, ‘Boy, did you miss a good one,’ ” and Robinson replied, “ ‘That’s what everybody is telling me.’ ” As Levi recalled, Barack “accepted quickly too.”10
Spring classes began on January 25, and Barack, Rob Fisher, Mark Kozlowski, and Cassandra Butts all chose for their elective 18th and 19th Century American Legal History, taught by assistant professor William “Terry” Fisher, a 1982 Harvard Law graduate who had clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. The three-hour-a-week lecture class covered “the formative era of American law,” with emphasis on the changes between the Revolution and the Civil War, especially regarding slavery. Famous cases like Marbury v. Madison and McCulloch v. Maryland were supplemented by doctrinal-specific readings addressing contracts, torts, property law, criminal law, and the status of women. The semester’s final three weeks were devoted to slavery, with recent articles by leading scholars like Paul Finkelman and Robert Cottroll playing a central role.
Section III’s Civ Pro also met for three hours a week, with Northeastern’s Stephen Subrin replacing David Shapiro. Some students found Subrin likable, while others felt he was a letdown compared to Shapiro. Contracts with Ian Macneil continued for three hours a week while Three Speech reported an unsupported rumor that “the Scowling Scot” might remain at Harvard more than one year. Lisa Hay occasionally included a crossword puzzle, and one had the clue, “He pauses before speaking.” The correct answer was “Obama.”
Rob Fisher had stopped attending Contracts—“It was so horrible that I basically skipped all of it”—but Barack remained a regular if sometimes tardy presence. Three Speech’s list of “highlights” included “February 21: Obama knocks on contracts door, 9:21 A.M.,” more than twenty minutes late. Ken Mack remembered that Barack was one of Macneil’s “favorite students,” and Macneil recalled that he had “such a commanding presence…. I was always a little too impatient in class, so if students went off the track, I would interrupt before I should. When I did that with Barack, he said ‘Let me finish.’ He wasn’t rude, just firm.’ ”
Spring’s most weighty course was five hours a week of Property Law, taught by Mary Ann Glendon, a 1961 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School who had joined the Harvard faculty in 1987. She assigned the class A. James Casner et al.’s 1,315-page Cases and Text on Property, 3rd ed. On the first day, Glendon called on Barack, mispronouncing his surname by making it rhyme with Alabama. Barack corrected her. Paolo Di Rosa thought that “was kind of a nervy thing to do,” but Barack “had the confidence to do that without being rude about it.”
Three Speech regularly captured how Glendon’s excellent sense of humor made for a relaxed classroom atmosphere. “I assume that a lot of you are in some relation to Harvard,” Glendon suggested. “What’s that relation? What? No, I don’t mean ‘serfdom.’ ” On another occasion, a student asked, “How long do you have to, you know, ah, live together, for these common-law marriages?” and Glendon drily responded, “Why do you ask?” Glendon was a widely popular teacher, and Rob Fisher remembered her as “an excellent professor” whom he and Barack visited for some “very open-ended, interesting intellectual discussions.” Fellow students recall both Barack and Rob as regular classroom participants. Ken Mack thought Glendon was “very interested in what Obama had to say in class” and “liked him a lot.” Edward Felsenthal, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of Princeton, would “vividly remember” Barack as someone who “talked all the time” in Property. There were some “heated battles between Barack and Mary Ann Glendon,” Felsenthal recalled, because Obama “objected to some pretty core tenets of the common law of property.” So “they went at it,” and “nobody else sparred like he sparred with her.” Rob remembered a time when Glendon asked why a court had set aside a condominium bylaw barring children as residents. Barack spoke up, saying, “Folks gotta live someplace,” and “everyone laughs,” but the crux of his response—the reasonableness standard—was indeed key. That “tells you a lot about how he was thinking about” legal questions while at Harvard, Rob explains. He and Barack “loved” Glendon’s “great” class, even though twenty years later Glendon would refuse to appear on the same platform with her former student because of her intense opposition to abortion.11
In early February, the Harvard Law Record and the Harvard Crimson gave front-page coverage to news that the student-run Harvard Law Review had elected an Asian American 2L as its new president and an African American woman as one of its two supervising editors. Crystal Nix, a 1985 Princeton graduate who had been a New York Times reporter prior to law school, was the first black person ever elevated to one of the Review’s top masthead positions.
Far more controversial news landed a week later when Harvard president Derek Bok, a 1954 graduate of the law school who had served as its dean for three years before being elevated to the presidency in 1971, unexpectedly chose forty-four-year-old Robert C. Clark as the new law dean. Clark was “generally well-liked by students,” the Crimson reported, because he was an excellent classroom teacher, but some of his more liberal colleagues complained about the selection of the conservative law and economics proponent. In the Boston Globe and the New York Times, Gerald Frug called Clark “a terrible choice” and Morton Horwitz denounced the selection as “a disaster for the law school,” asserting that Clark had opposed the appointments of women and minority professors. Clark rebutted Horwitz’s claims as “untrue” and “terribly unfair,” while three more professors attacked Clark. In contrast, prominent liberal constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe spoke positively about Clark, and a Wall Street Journal editorial praised the selection. Several weeks later the controversy seemed to subside when the faculty unanimously promoted Randall Kennedy and Kathleen Sullivan to full professor, the third black male and the sixth white woman holding tenured appointments.12
At 12:30 P.M. on Thursday, February 23, the 1Ls’ exam grades were finally distributed. Barack and Rob had mixed reactions. In David Rosenberg’s Torts, Rob earned a straight A, and Barack something similar, but in Richard Parker’s Crim Law, Rob received only a B+, and as he remembered, “Barack and I both didn’t like the grade we got.” Many classmates would have been overjoyed to receive a B+, as they confronted lower grades than they had ever before received. For some, the “effect was devastating,” but not so for Barack and Rob, who plunged into the Ames Moot Court assignment that would culminate with a faux oral argument on Thursday evening, March 23, the night before spring break began.
The ungraded Ames exercise had four written assignments: an initial “issues analysis” of the faux case, an outline of the brief to the three-judge faux court, a draft of the brief, as well as the final brief. Throughout the six weeks, students had four conferences with Scott Becker, the twenty-five-year-old 3L from Illinois who had led their fall Legal Methods class and was now the teams’ adviser. Barack and Rob took opposing sides, with Mark Kozlowski as Barack’s partner and Lisa Hertzer as Rob’s. Their case involved two issues related to inside information and the stock market: the first was whether a clerical employee had violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 in buying stock based on a research report she had proofread, and the second was whether sharing that information with a friend with whom she then twice purchased stock represented a conspiracy punishable under the RICO Act of 1970. Each student team was given a twenty-two-page faux indictment of the two defendants, “Janine Egan” and “Jennifer Cleary,” that gave