The New York Times is running a series on Professor Obama.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The main article looks at the years he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
They spoke with his fellow professors and students. The article looks at his teaching style and the classes he taught.
here is the link to part 2:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/...
More after the jump....
The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship.
And so begins a fascinating article on Barack Obama's turn as a professor at University of Chicago Law School.
There are 3 parts to the article.
The first covers a general look at his teaching style, his students impressions and his fellow professors.
In this it is noted that while Obama was popular with his students and well liked by fellow professors, he stood apart from them. Unlike the stories of his fellow senators in the State, where he was in a weekly poker game and hung around them and made friends, at the University he was not close to anyone and rarely took part in things like the weekly round table.
They discuss the classes he taught:
At the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the field.
The article goes on later to explain the emphasis he put on civil rights but, he also looked at the failures as well of many liberal policies and judgments as well as success.
Liberal students saw his class as a haven in a school known to be more conservative then most. Obama was a known progressive.
They looked at Obama's teaching style and his popularity with the students:
For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. "Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?" he asked in a mock-innocent voice.
We get glimpses of his early politics and emerging themes that are so familiar today.
The second part is a run down of what they uncovered of his remaining notes, memos, tests, ect.
In these documents they found some notes about going to the gym and Michelle, but they don't tell what they said. Darn!
But, it leads to part 3, to be published tomorrow.
We’re posting the documents here, and inviting you to offer your insights. Since the exam questions in particular involve hard-to-parse issues of constitutional law, we have asked four legal experts, of diverse ideological backgrounds, to lead our inquiry. John Eastman, Randy Barnett, Pamela S. Karlan and Akhil Reed Amar have already looked through the documents, at our request, and on Wednesday we will post their assessments here.
The last section will be interesting to read about and what these experts have to say.
Update:Johnkwilson has a new diary with new insights from someone who knows the people and the University.
It's a very good diary.