Griswold was happy with the two six-page “Recent Cases” summaries, one of which, by Barack’s basketball buddy Tom Perrelli, a 1988 magna cum laude graduate of Brown, exemplified how 2L editors were expected to do at least one brief piece of individual writing in addition to their pool or team assignments. Barack may not have been doing his share of the work on the Cook edit, but by late October, he was well under way writing a comment on a late 1988 decision by the Illinois Supreme Court, which held that a young child injured in an auto accident while she was still a fetus cannot sue her mother for monetary damages. Laurence Tribe was completing work on a book surveying the ongoing U.S. political debate over abortion, and Barack was one of more than a dozen of his research assistants whom Tribe had asked to read and summarize relevant materials.
Barack mentioned the case comment he was writing to his mother at the same time he told her that, unlike the previous year’s Christmas holiday, he was coming to Honolulu and Michelle Robinson was coming with him. Maya had not returned to Barnard for her sophomore year and had joined her mother in Jakarta before returning to Honolulu, where she was waitressing at a restaurant. Barack had not seen his mother, who was now forty-six years old, since Christmas 1987, when he had taken Sheila Jager to Hawaii to meet his family. Just after he started at Harvard, Ann had moved back to Jakarta to take a job at the People’s Bank of Indonesia—Bank Rakyat Indonesia, or BRI—the country’s oldest financial institution and one specializing in microfinance, small loans to artisans and retailers. Ann had lost interest in completing her long-delayed dissertation, telling her old friend Julia Suryakasuma that “the creative part was over long ago, and it’s just a matter of finishing the damn thing.”
But her new work put her in direct contact with the people whose artisanal pursuits she had devoted her fieldwork to studying. Ann also had begun a fulfilling relationship with Made Suarjana, a married journalist eighteen years her junior, and in November, she wrote to Alice Dewey, her longtime mentor, to tell her that she would be returning to Honolulu for the holiday. She told Dewey that Maya’s time in Indonesia “seems to have done her a lot of good, unstressed her and renewed her self-confidence” after a rocky first year at Barnard. “Barry is also coming at Christmas with a new girlfriend in tow. He is still enjoying law school and writing pro-choice opinions of the abortion issue for the Law Review.”
No matter what Barack told his mother about his case comment, which went to press in early December, its pro-choice stance was extremely measured. The Illinois court had defended its holding on the grounds that otherwise the mother and her fetus would be “legal adversaries from the moment of conception until birth.” Obama commended the court for its “thoughtful approach” and wrote that the case “highlights the unsuitability of fetal-maternal tort suits as vehicles for promoting fetal health.” He said the suit “also indicates the dangers such causes of action present to women’s autonomy, and the need for a constitutional framework to constrain future attempts to expand ‘fetal rights,’ ” because “fetal-maternal tort suits affect even more fundamental interests of bodily integrity and privacy” on the part of women. He wrote that the state may have “a more compelling interest in ensuring that fetuses carried to term do not suffer from debilitating injuries than it does in ensuring that any particular fetus is born,” but again stressed the primacy of “women’s interests in autonomy and privacy.” Obama concluded the piece by recommending that “expanded access to prenatal education and health care facilities will far more likely serve the very real state interest in preventing increasing numbers of children from being born into lives of pain and despair.”24
Before fall classes ended on December 8, two Chicagoans visited the law school. Elvin Charity, a 1979 Harvard Law graduate who had worked for Harold Washington, was now one of two black partners at the Chicago law firm of Hopkins & Sutter. Charity was on his firm’s recruiting committee “to help to promote the hiring of African-American lawyers,” and Harvard was an annual target. Second-year students traditionally split their summers between a pair of firms, and although Barack would return to Sidley & Austin for part of the upcoming summer, Hopkins & Sutter was another attractive Chicago firm. To Charity, “Barack was particularly striking” in part because he showed up for his interview “pretty casually dressed,” rather than in a suit and tie. “He just seemed so nonchalant about the whole thing,” with “a calmness and a seeming maturity beyond his years.” Charity knew the significance of Barack’s Law Review membership, but Obama “did not seem to be full of himself” and an offer was quickly extended and accepted.
The second Chicago visitor was Michelle Robinson, who along with an Asian American colleague was there on behalf of Sidley to speak to minority 1Ls about job search techniques at an evening session sponsored by all three ethnic—black, Latino, and Asian—student groups. Several ’91 and ’92 BLSA women who had heard Barack talk about Michelle realized this would be a perfect opportunity to “go see who this person is,” and “we were very impressed with her,” Jan-Michele Lemon remembered. “She was very engaging and warm and friendly.”
Michelle’s Wednesday visit came just two days before the end of classes, and the next Monday Barack faced the first of three fall semester final exams. Upper-class exams took place in December, not mid-January, but Barack had Edley’s Ad Law and Tribe’s Con Law take-homes back-to-back on the first two days of exam period. Edley’s emphasized that “it is important to demonstrate that you have synthesized the assigned readings and course materials,” and students had to answer six out of nine questions, with responses limited to 150 to 500 words apiece.
Tribe’s open-book final posed just one essay question, with answers limited to 1,750 words. The hypothetical situation involved an abortion clinic employee who had been fired for telling a woman the sex of her fetus. The woman then aborted the fetus, citing avowedly religious reasons, because it was female. The fired employee had been denied unemployment benefits, and Tribe’s hypothetical played off a recently argued U.S. Supreme Court case, Employment Division v. Smith, which also involved a state’s refusal of unemployment benefits to a worker fired because of religion-based conduct. Tribe asked students to write their best decision of the case. Six days later, on December 18, Barack and Rob had their last fall exam, for Kraakman’s Corporations class. Then Barack was free to head to Honolulu, though upper-class students’ single winter session course would begin promptly on Tuesday, January 2.25
Barack’s introduction of Michelle Robinson to Ann, Toot, Gramps, and Maya signified, just like Sheila’s visit two Christmases earlier, how serious this six-month-old relationship was. After Michelle’s early December visit to Harvard, “it was clear that they were ‘a couple,’ ” her close Sidley friend Kelly Jo MacArthur recalled, and “the discussions turned fairly soon to whether they were going to get married or not.” That clearly came up during their time together in Honolulu, because soon after they flew back to the mainland, Ann Dunham sent her close Indonesian friend Julia Suryakusuma a description of Michelle. “She is intelligent, very tall (6'1"), not beautiful but quite attractive. She did her BA at Princeton and her law degree at Harvard. But she has spent most of her life in Chicago,” so she was “a little provincial and not as international as Barry. She is nice, though, and if he goes ahead and marries her after he finishes law school, I will have no objections.”
Almost the first day he returned to Cambridge, Barack wrote to Sheila Jager, who two months earlier had returned to the U.S. from South Korea. Barack had written to Sheila regularly throughout her time abroad, once sending