Fall semester classes began on September 6. Barack and Rob had carefully debated their choices. In Laurence Tribe’s huge and oversubscribed Constitutional Law section, which met five hours per week, they were joined by a number of their 1L Section III classmates. The assigned casebook, William B. Lockhart et al.’s Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials, 6th ed., was the best available. Word among students was that African American professor Christopher Edley, who was back after serving as issues director for Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign, was “refreshingly good.” His class, Administrative Law, might sound dry and arcane, but Edley taught the sixty-five-student, four-hour-a-week class as an entirely practical “this is how the public policy process works” course, and he supplemented the main text, Walter Gellhorn et al.’s Administrative Law, 8th ed., with various other materials.
Rob and Barack had “an extended discussion” about taking Corporations, as most 2Ls did, weighing the upside value of “understanding the world” versus how their grades in the four-credit class might harm their goal of graduating magna cum laude. But they began it and kept it, finding that Professor Reinier Kraakman, a Yale law graduate with a Harvard sociology Ph.D., “had an interesting mind and approach.” Kraakman focused on “the control of managers in publicly held corporations” and emphasized “the functional analysis of legal rules as one set of constraints on corporate actors.” Rob and Barack found it “a good class, really cool,” and “really enjoyed it.”
Edley’s Ad Law was “almost as exciting as the Torts class” a year earlier with David Rosenberg. “Barack and I loved the Ad Law class” and “had a tremendous amount of fun” in it, Rob remembers, for Edley was “inspiring” and had “this very functional, argumentative intellectual approach.” The course “stimulated a lot of deep discussions,” plus a number of office-hours conversations with Edley, whom Rob thought was “truly a great teacher.”
Mark Kozlowski recalled that Tribe’s Constitutional Law had “a really lively atmosphere.” As in all sizable classes, seats were preassigned, and Scott Scheper, a 1988 summa cum laude graduate of Case Western Reserve University, found himself in a second-row aisle seat, at the front of the bowl-style classroom, with Obama just to his right. Like Scheper, Laura Jehl, a 1986 highest honors graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, had been in a different 1L section than Obama. But she already knew Tribe from her work on U.S. senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Judiciary Committee staff, and she was also already one of Tribe’s research assistants. Jehl took note of Obama from the outset of Tribe’s class. He “spoke up and said something eminently reasonable, eminently thoughtful,” and with an “absolutely amazing voice.”
Section III survivor Jennifer Radding remembered that Barack “was exceptional in Tribe’s class” and that “Tribe was like in love with him in a very intellectual way.” Sarah Leah Whitson witnessed it too. “Barack seemed to be operating at another level…. His rapport back and forth with Tribe felt more like a dialogue among equals.” Kevin Downey, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth, noted how Obama spoke in “narrative-based” style that often included references to his own experiences, while Rob Fisher, who also stood out, made “more analytic comments.” Downey thought they “were leagues beyond the rest of us.”
Seated next to Obama, Scott Scheper had as close a view as anyone. Tribe was “a whole lot more theoretical” than he had anticipated, more interested in “What’s right? What should be?” than in “How is? What is?” Obama was “facile and adept,” and “talked more than any other single individual” in the class. Scheper recalled that “Tribe spent a whole lot of time not six feet from me in what almost became personal dialogue between him and Barack…. He would leave the lectern and come over … to our side of the class and be right in front of the front row and then Barack would be talking to him.” The scene made Scheper “sort of self-conscious that I had to maintain my posture because the whole class was looking right at me because that’s where the focus of the dialogue was.”
Several weeks in, Scheper’s demanding Trial Advocacy Workshop kept him away from Con Law for several classes. When he returned, Rob Fisher was in his spot, and Scheper realized that Obama “gave away my seat because I didn’t come to class.” Barack immediately apologized: “I thought you dropped the class.” Then the regular pattern resumed. Obama “was always engaged in these esoteric discussions with Professor Tribe…. They spent a lot of time talking about what the law should be.” All told, Rob explained, with Tribe plus Edley and Kraakman, fall 1989 “was a pretty fun semester.”20
That fall was Robert Clark’s first as dean of the law school. The school had been in the news over the summer because of the arrest and suspension of an African American 3L accused of raping a Harvard undergraduate. But Clark played right into the hands of his detractors when he terminated the school’s public interest career counselor before the semester began. Clark called the move “a reorientation of resources” away from something that served only “symbolic, guilt-alleviating purposes,” but progressive students reacted immediately. A protest rally attracted a crowd of three hundred, with Barack’s close friend Cassandra Butts telling the Harvard Law Record, “I came to law school in particular because I was very much interested in helping people who don’t have access to the law and who see the law as being more of a hindrance than a help to them.”
Students viewed Clark’s move as a tangible, public rebuke of those motives, and quickly created the Emergency Coalition for Public Interest Placement. National legal publications and the Boston Globe all covered the controversy, but the Harvard Crimson highlighted how tiny a percentage of Harvard Law students actually took public interest jobs once they graduated. Butts told the Crimson that many students arrived with such an interest, “but with the emphasis here on corporate law, they don’t always leave with that attitude.” Given the “insurmountable number of loans they need to pay off,” students may “choose to go into corporate work, but they will be more sensitive to the need for pro bono lawyers.” As the fall semester progressed, eight hundred law students signed letters protesting Clark’s move, then dumped them outside the dean’s office during a one-hundred-person rally that the Record said had “an emotional, near confrontational tone.” As Christopher Edley ruefully recalled, Clark “was screwing up massively.”21
In late September, Barack flew back to Chicago to take part in a Friday-afternoon roundtable discussion on community organizing. Funded by Ken Rolling and Jean Rudd at Woods, the event built on the commissioned essays Obama and others had written for Illinois Issues a year earlier. Sokoni Karanja, Wieboldt’s Anne Hallett, and several local academics were part of the group, and, as he had in other settings, Barack refrained from talking until the discussion was well under way. When he did speak, Barack highlighted what he called “the educative function of organizing,” for “at some point you have to link up … with the larger trends, larger movements in the city or the country. I think we are not very good at that.” He suggested that “I am not sure we talk enough in organizing” about organizing’s internal culture, and “we don’t understand what the relationship between organizing and politics should be…. I would like to think that ideally you would focus on the local but educate for the broader arena, and that you are creating a base for political or national issues.” Barack expressed disappointment that organizing had a “suspicion of politics,” for “politics is a major arena of power” and “to marginalize yourself from that process is a damaging thing, and one that needs to be rethought.” His critique was fundamental, and strong. “Organizing right now doesn’t have a long-term vision.”
In the 1960s, “a lot was lost during the civil rights movement because there was not enough effective organizing consolidating those gains,” but now organizers were ignoring the potential of working with movement-style efforts, and “that long-term vision needs to be developed.” Barack returned to organizing’s educative mission. “How do you educate people