Barack Obama taught Constitutional Law At Chicago Law School. Dkos diary by one of his students

[beachmom]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/20/12119/122

Professor Obama and Me

by Adam B

Thu Dec 20, 2007 at 11:48:20 AM PST

It was 1996, and there I was, in a seminar room with maybe fifteen students, not knowing that I was learning from the man who might be the next President of the United States.

...

Spring quarter of my second year, I took Voting Rights and Election Law as a seminar with Professor Obama. Now, let’s be clear: in a school with a lot of Somebodies – Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook, Cass Sunstein and David Currie – he was a relative nobody, and even compared with other younger faculty, it was Larry Lessig and Elena Kagan who had more of the hype. But Obama was teaching a course in a subject I wanted to study – at a point when I realized that law school was too short to be spent in classes that felt obligatory – and that made it an easy decision.

And he was ... different. For one thing, better dressed. Sleek sweaters and blazers as opposed to ill-fitting, coffee-stained suits with mismatched ties. But he was also less formal, more relaxed – he never taught the class as though he knew the answers to all the questions he was posing and was just hiding the ball from us until we could find them. Confident, sure, but never cocky.

What’s more, he taught Voting Rights in a different way than others do. He didn’t use a textbook, for starters, but rather had us each purchase an eight-inch high multilith of cases, law review articles and statutes that he had personally compiled. And they weren’t all the "big" cases either – no, our class started by reviewing some early-19th century cases about the denial of the franchise, so that as the course moved forward we saw "voting rights" not as some static thing to be analyzed, but a constantly- and still-evolving process to be affected. Over the course of a few months, we studied changes in the franchise, changes in the rights of political parties, campaign finance law and redistricting, among other topics. We learned the law, but we also learned it on the level of real-world impact: based on a whites-only party primary, how many people would be denied a voice? What kind of policies would result from such a legislature?

(Mind you, he was running for the State Senate at the same time. Honestly, I had no idea. Law school is something of a cocoon, and he never brought his outside life into the classroom.)

Much in the Chicago tradition, he wanted all voices to be heard in the classroom, and when there a viewpoint that wasn’t being expressed or students were too complacent in their liberal views, he’d push the contrary view himself. These classes were conversations.

And the conversations extended outside the classroom. I spent plenty of time in Prof. Obama’s office, talking to him about the paper I was working on. Just the two of us, one on one, with him always provoking me to think deeper, work harder ...

... and keep it real. During my senior year of college, I had written a 100 page honors thesis on racial gerrymandering, mostly focused on the original understanding of what "representation" meant, arguing that to properly understand the Federalist Papers and John Stuart Mill meant that representatives had to each filter the views of their constituents, and that you couldn’t have a process in which the legislature decided which groups were guaranteed seats in Congress, and so therefore, the whole process of guaranteeing "majority-minority districts" in contemporary America was wrong.

Prof. Obama taught me to think about it differently. He made me look at this as a real world issue, and not as a theoretical construct. And in that world, unless some voices are physically present, they won’t be heard at all – and in the real world, legislatures are drawing their own maps to accumulate power, largely for incumbents. In other words, don’t just be principled when everyone else is being pragmatic – fight for your principles with a pragmatic approach.

So, yes, I then spent 20+ pages demolishing what I spent a hundred building just two years before. Why? It reminds me of this courtroom scene between Denzel Washington and the trial judge in Philadelphia:

Judge Garrett: In this courtroom, Mr.Miller, justice is blind to matters of race, creed, color, religion, and sexual orientation.

Joe Miller: With all due respect, your honor, we don't live in this courtroom, do we?

Professor Barack Obama reminded me that whatever my beliefs were, I’d have to find a way to implement them in the real world if I wanted to make change happen. Good lesson. Great professor.

Oh, and I only got a B on the paper.

There are some who choose to shoot down an extraordinary man like Barack Obama with small thinking and petty attacks. If they think their absurd and low slams are going to deter or distract either Obama or the supporters behind him, then they are gravely mistaken. Yes We Can.