The Footnotes President

As editor of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama practised serious, careful consideration of complex problems. Good training for one future job in particular.

One of the less examined parts of Barack Obama’s career is his time at law school, where he served as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama didn’t talk much about Harvard on the campaign trail. His rhetorical flights and obvious intelligence made him vulnerable enough to charges of elitism, never mind his laments about the price of arugula. Talking about managing a highfalutin law journal would probably only have made things worse.

So whereas we heard repeatedly about Obama’s days as a community organizer, his time editing legal footnotes remained a footnote of the campaign.

Yet Obama’s time on the Law Review is significant. The Law Review was the first organization that Obama led. Moreoever, Obama’s status as the Review’s first African-American president shone a national spotlight on him, even if only briefly, eventually paving the way for the book contract for Dreams of My Father.

Law journals may seem esoteric, but in the legal world, the Law Review is an important institution. Founded in 1887 by a group that included future U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, it is arguably the world’s leading law journal. Like most U.S. law journals, it is run almost entirely by student volunteers, yet is the preferred place to publish for many of America’s most eminent legal scholars. Every year, 40 editors are chosen, through a combination of grades and a writing competition, to serve on the Review. The role means spending many hours a week scrutinizing every detail of 70-page legal articles. It is also considered prestigious and, accurately or not, a sign of legal acumen.

To become president of the Review, Obama would have had to undergo a unique and difficult electoral process. The candidates for the presidency – when I was on the Law Review there were 10 – stay in a separate room while the rest of their colleagues sit in a nearby auditorium and debate their merits at length, behind their backs. Once the editors are ready to cull the field, a vote occurs, and the number of candidates is cut from 10 to 5, then from 5 to 3, and so on. The eliminated candidates quietly join the assembly and enter the debate. In my year the process began at 9 a.m. and finished at 9 p.m. A political scientist could write a whole study about it.

Obama was also president of the Law Review at a time when the journal was apparently poisoned by divisive politics. Battles over identity politics loomed large at Harvard Law School in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, as students staged sit-ins over diversity in faculty hirings, and the Law Review fractured between Right and Left. Some say Obama’s approach to governing the Law Review – trying to bridge this divide – anticipated the “post-partisanship” theme of his candidacy and presidency.

I don’t know for sure how being on the Harvard Law Review shaped the future President, but I can say that, as Law Review president, he would likely have had to exhibit a few key traits: an appetite for detail; a capacity for hard, but not always glamorous, work; an interest in ideas; a nimble intellect; a respect for tradition.

We know most of these things about President Obama anyway. But extrapolating them from his law journal days comforts me, in a way. I will probably never meet President Obama, but when I picture him making a decision or engaging an argument, I picture him sitting in Gannett House, the draughty 18th-century building that housed the Law Review then as now, and debating some arcane legal issue in the same earnest, cerebral, and self-serious way my colleagues and I did when we were on the Review. And, somehow, this gives me confidence that the leader of the Free World will not take decisions lightly, and that he will make them in a structured, orderly fashion.

The Bush-era Justice Department memos released in the past few weeks, which analyze whether harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA constituted torture, are a stark reminder that, even for Presidents, footnotes matter.