Before Barack began studying in earnest for late May’s final exams, he faced a trio of choices. Wednesday night, April 12, was the informational meeting for 1Ls interested in the weeklong writing competition that would take place in early June to select thirty-eight members of the Class of 1991 for the prestigious Harvard Law Review. The next evening was the initial editors’ meeting for the upcoming year’s Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, which Barack had worked on as one of thirty 1Ls during the preceding months. One 2L editor, Sung-Hee Suh, remembered Barack “talking very calmly” during a sometimes heated discussion of hate speech, “articulating both sides” of the debate as students of color and free speech absolutists disagreed vehemently on the issue. She recalled thinking he was very “calm, cool, and collected.” Outgoing managing editor Wendy Pollack noted that Barack did not participate in the journal’s election for the upcoming year’s board, a clear sign that he intended to try for the premier Law Review instead. Barack had asked David Rosenberg whether he should do so, and Rosenberg said, “Yes, of course.”
April 13 was also preregistration for fall classes, but the 1Ls would not learn until May 8 whether or not they had gotten into popular, oversubscribed courses, such as Laurence Tribe’s section of Constitutional Law. Cassandra Butts remembered that “Barack did not get in,” but some “special pleading” with Tribe quickly succeeded.
Monday, May 15, was the last day of spring classes, and Lauren Ezrol and Michelle Jacobs both recall Obama telling their Contracts class that anyone who would like a copy of the outline he had prepared from both semesters’ worth of notes was welcome to it. Jacobs remembered that the document was easily 100, if not 150, typed pages and “had little jokes in it. It was great.” Barack had many takers, because almost everyone agreed with Greg Sater’s assessment that Barack “was the smartest in the class.” Lauren Ezrol agreed: “he just seemed smart and impressive and so sure of himself and well-spoken and older.”
Barack had his Legal History take-home exam on Monday, May 22, followed by Section III’s trio of tests: Property on Wednesday afternoon, Contracts on Friday morning, and Civ Pro on Tuesday, May 30. Property and Civ Pro would cover just the spring, but Macneil’s Contracts exam would determine everyone’s entire grade for the full year, six credits, and “people were really worried,” Brad Wiegmann remembered. David Attisani asserted that Section III suffered “mass hysteria” in advance of the Macneil final.
Mary Ann Glendon’s Property exam was an unpleasant surprise to many members of Section III, with Mark Kozlowski remembering that some of the questions “had nothing to do with the stuff we had covered in class.” Steven Heinen agreed, recalling that students first encountered the word “easement” only on the test. Half of the test, involving six specific questions, concerned Native Americans on “Vintucket” island who were being pressured to sell their seaside property to an aggressive celebrity. An estranged, unmarried couple’s frozen embryos, a building lease, and a “takings” issue constituted the balance of Glendon’s exam.
Friday morning, May 26, brought literal shrieks of horror when angry students confronted Ian Macneil’s bizarrely demanding Contracts exam, which instructed them to write their answers “ONLY INSIDE THE BOX AFTER EACH QUESTION” on the twenty-five-page test. The first, three-part, twenty-minute question asked whether a U.S.–Soviet nuclear missile treaty did or did not constitute a contract, depending on how that concept was defined. An answer of up to fourteen lines was permitted. Ten subsequent questions, ranging from ten to twenty-five minutes apiece, involved, among other topics, a nephew cut out of a will on account of his race and the sale of fourteen hundred convertible sofas. Student complaints raged. Following the Memorial Day weekend, Section III’s “very intense year,” as Paolo Di Rosa termed it, ended with a straightforward two-question open-book Civ Pro exam from Stephen Subrin.15
Two hundred eighty-five 1Ls—179 men and 106 women—had decided to enter the Harvard Law Review’s writing competition, and only one day separated the end of final exams and the distribution of the HLR materials. The weeklong assignment consisted of two parts. First was a Bluebook test—The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, then in its fourteenth edition, dated back to 1926, and was the most widely used style manual in legal academia. First-year students had been introduced to the volume’s arcane instructions, especially for abbreviations, the previous fall in Legal Methods, but this HLR competition was their first real opportunity to apply its editing rules.
The second and far more demanding part entailed writing a lengthy essay—in law review parlance a “note”—weighing the merits and demerits of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County. A 6–3 majority had rebuffed a claim that a child who suffered severe brain damage at his father’s hands could sue the local child protection agency, alleging a deprivation of his Fourteenth Amendment right to “liberty.” The Fourteenth Amendment covers only state action, and the majority held that state officials do not have a constitutional obligation to protect children from their parents. Justice Harry A. Blackmun filed an emotional dissent.
Barack had a full week to work on the two-part assignment before it had to be postmarked and mailed to the Review’s offices. But on the day it was due, his car would not start, and time was short. He called Rob Fisher, who was just heading out the door, but Rob immediately drove to Somerville and took Barack to the closest post office, where there was a long line. But Rob remembered Barack successfully sweet-talking his way forward, explaining to people that his envelope had to be postmarked by noon.
On the cover sheet that accompanied the submission, the applicant was asked for their summer contact information. They also had the option of indicating their gender and race, and they could provide a brief personal statement if they had experienced any major hardships in life. The writing competition dated back to 1969, but only in 1981 did the Review introduce affirmative action into the process to increase diversity. Only a trio of rising 2L editors who oversaw the selection process would know whether and to what degree those indicators were considered when all entrants’ scores were collated.
At the Review’s offices on the second and third floors of Gannett House, a wooden Greek Revival structure that dated to 1838, newly hired twenty-four-year-old editorial assistant Susan Higgins collected the 285 entries, assigned each a number, removed their cover sheets, and began sending batches of the submissions to the three dozen 2L editors, now scattered at their summer jobs all across the country. They would grade the numbered papers and send them back to Cambridge. Some of those 2Ls wondered whether the choice of DeShaney inadvertently gave 1Ls of one particular political stripe an advantage on their essays. “There were more interesting arguments to be made on the conservative side,” thought Dan Bromberg, a 1986 summa cum laude graduate of Yale, “and so more points to be won” there than for 1Ls who sided with the dissenters. The grading was a multiweek process, at the end of which the 2L officers, including President Peter Yu, the Review’s first Asian American leader, collated the results and factored in the contestants’ 1L grades that Susan Higgins had gotten from the registrar’s office.
Half of the thirty-eight slots would go to the top writing competition scorers; the other half would be determined by an equation based 30 percent upon those scores and 70 percent upon their 1L grades. If a contestant had indicated their minority status, that fact, but not their names, was flagged on their submission. Gordon Whitman, incoming cochair of the Review’s Articles Office and a member of the selection trio, recalled that race was “a little bit of a featherweight on the process,” but it did not count “a whole lot.” Only when the numerical selections had been made did Susan Higgins match the chosen numbers with the individuals’ names: “I was the keeper of the names with the numbers,” she explained.
In midsummer, the successful contestants—twenty-two men and sixteen women—received a phone call, and then a confirming letter, telling them they had been selected. But there was a tangible cost: they would have to leave their highly remunerative summer jobs three weeks early to return to Cambridge before the beginning of fall classes, to start work on the Review’s first issue of the new academic year.16
In preparation for the summer, Barack had “sublet the cheapest apartment