We all seem to appreciate the eye candy we get from Al Rodgers and other diarists. I thought I would post some "brain candy" from The New York Times' Caucus Blog about Barack Obama's time teaching law at the University of Chicago.
There's a Page One article in today's Times entitled Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart. It's been the subject of several diaries here at DailyKos including one that is fairly negative entitled New York Times Distorts Obama's U of Chicago's Years, and another that is more positive entitled Professor Obama. My view of the article was pretty positive but what's absolutely great are comments from other law professors on the Times' Caucus Blog praising Obama's professorial skills. More down below.
The Caucus Blog provides pdf copies of some of the exams Obama gave as well as a syllabus from Obama's "Racism and the Law" class. These copies are fun to read for those of us lawyers who have at least a few fond memories of law school. The blog then asked four legal scholars, including a Georgetown law professor affiliated with the arch libertarian Cato Institute and a former law clerk for Clarence Thomas, for their assessment of Obama's materials.
The assessments are overwhelmingly positive.
Look at the praise for Obama's exams from Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional law professor at Yale who clerked for Justice Breyer:
First, As a constitutional law professor, I came away impressed — dazzled, really — by the analytic intelligence and sophistication of these questions and answers. A really good exam — an exam that tests and stretches the student, while simultaneously providing the professor with a handy and fair index to rank the class — is its own special art form. Composing such an exam is like crafting a sonnet or a crossword puzzle. We don’t have Obama’s answer key every year; but the questions themselves are in many instances beautifully constructed to enable students to explore the seams and plumb the depths of the Supreme Court’s case law. I am tempted to use variations of several of these questions myself in some future exam. (I won’t say which, lest I tip my students off.) When I read Jodi Kantor’s piece, I was very interested to hear that the University of Chicago Law School was willing to offer Obama tenure. In these materials I see why.
It's no surprise that Professor Amar goes on to compare Obama to Lincoln for his "moral depth and legal brilliance."
Randy Barnett, the Cato Institute senior fellow, also praised Obama's exams, stating that:
The exam question and answer keys manifest a keen comprehension of then-prevailing Supreme Court Due Process and Equal Protection Clause doctrine. There is no doubt that his students were taught "the law" (such as it was), not merely the teacher’s viewpoints. His exam questions were nicely designed to ferret out the student’s understanding, but also the cracks and fissures in the Supreme Court’s current approach to the Constitution.
But I was equally impressed with Professor Barnett's opinion of Obama's seminar discussion topics:
I was struck by Obama’s list of possible discussion topics for his seminar. They comprehensively and concisely identified most of the issues of "race and the law" that were then being widely discussed. What particularly impressed me was how even handed were his presentations of the competing sides the students might take. These summaries were remarkably free of the sort of cant and polemics that all too often afflicts academic discussions of race. Were this not a seminar on "racism and the law" I doubt one could tell which side of each issue the teacher was on. And indeed, even knowing it was written by Senator Obama, one cannot be sure which side of each issue he really took. Whatever position he held, however, Obama could clearly see and dispassionately articulate the other side.
That's how the law is supposed to be taught.
The former Thomas law clerk, John C. Eastman, also praised Obama for including readings and discussion topics from across the ideological spectrum, going on to say:
What is more, it is evident from the sampling of proposed topics for group presentations contained in the syllabus that this spectrum of authors was included for more than mere exposure. Rather, it appears that then-Professor Obama was leading his students in an honest assessment of competing views regarding some of the most difficult legal and policy issues our nation has ever faced—a refreshing change from what passes for debate about contested questions in our political classes these days.
The fourth legal scholar, Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and a former clerk of Justice Blackmun had several interesting observations, which included the following:
First, Senator Obama has a first-rate mind for legal doctrine and could have been a first-rate academic had his interests gone in that direction. He would have been most unlikely – even beyond the fact that his values differ – to have bought into the legal work underlying many of the current Administration’s policies, such as the incomplete "torture memos."
Second, Senator Obama has a sensitivity to role. By this I mean that he doesn’t appear to have used his classroom as a platform for pushing his own pet theories of constitutional law. He seems to have taught "down the middle" in a way that gave the students the tools to be fine constitutional lawyers but didn’t require them to agree with his position. By contrast, I’ve seen other constitutional law professors’ exams and model answers where a student who disagrees with the professor’s idiosyncratic approach or policy preferences would have found it hard to do well.
There's more to the comments including the view that Obama kept his own opinions close to the vest but the choice seems pretty clear. We can elect the president of the Harvard Law Review who has won widespread praise for his ability to teach the law and the Constitution or we can pick the guy who finished 896th out of a class of 899.