Posted on 09/05/2008 9:56:30 AM PDT by Texas Songwriter
Can freeper lawyers weigh in on whether it is credible to believe one can be efficacious in teaching law, the beginnng the year you graduate law school. I went to medical school and when we go into the clinics and hospitals there was interactions with Pg1, PG2,PG3,PG4, and so on, but the teachers who instructed us in class were physicians certified in their various specialties,internal medicine, general surgery, gastroenterology, radiology, etc. I know lawyers do clerkships, sort of as a postgradualte internship....Did Obama do any clerkship? Did he do any advance training before he began teaching in law school? Did Obama actuallly practice law privately before he began to teach law in law school? I do not know what his history is and what is considered norm in law schools.
The following algorithm will explain Obama’s “accomplishments”:
Statement 1: Do until statement 3
Statement 2: Repeat after me, “Corruption and affirmative action”
Statement 3: Go to statement 1
There was apparently an exception for diversity — when a candidate has no practicing legal knowledge whatsoever but brings, well, the “black perspective.”
The U of Chicago is working hard to cover:
The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as “Senior Lecturer.”
From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School’s Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media/index.html
Maybe it is the old axiom, “those who can do and those who can’t teach”.
Sorry to any freeper teachers and professors.
Shoot, I know grad students still in law school teaching law. Lazy profs have student aids teach.
We have a lot of child psychologists who've never had children of their own.
We have a lot of idiot politicians making laws who have never had to live with the consequences of those laws.
We have a lot of idiot judges who dump unprocessed sewage (criminals) on the working and middle classes and then retreat behind their gated communities.
In my experience, a “lecturer” is an underemployed lawyer (like one who left full time practice for the Mommy track) who teaches basic practical subjects like legal research and writing, and trial practice, as opposed to the big academic subjects like contracts and torts.
No one EVER confused these folks with “law professors” at either law school I attended. U of Chicago (a highly respected Ivy-caliber school with some great conservative legal minds) seems to be blurring the distinction.
Thank you. Did Obama work in any clerkship that you know of??
Unfortunately, it happens too often. Law schools are filled with professors that have little work experience. Those that have the experience often worked essentially as law clerks in that they researched and briefed issues the majority of the time. Some that served in larger firms might have seen court time in appellate courts.
Not all lawyers are litigators and some very fine attorneys have had virtually no time in front of any judge. However, all attorneys have clients and need to know how to counsel clients. You don’t learn that in law school or even in practice when you are doing little other than research. Its hard for me to see an effective professor who has little or no experience counseling clients, but at the same time, they are hired to teach and teaching skills may be different from the skills necessary to be a good lawyer.
I remember reading awhile ago that as a member of the Harvard Law Review, it was very strange that Obama did not end up as a clerk at SCOTUS. It was discussed within the text of the argument that SCOTUS might actually have standards and verify answers he provided instead of rubber stamping him right on through like the DNC did.
I agree it is strange that he would go right to teaching. This Obama onion is all skin. No matter how much you peel, you never get the bottom of it.
Did he ever sit or pass the Bar Exam in any state??
No question. This happened ONLY because Obama was percived as a person of color. A white man (person without color) would have had to actually work and obtain some experience before teaching.
A law professor is normally expected to have a mixture of the following experience and expertise:
to regularly write schoarly law articles that are actually published in reputable scholarly law journals;
to have served as a law clerk for a judge after graduation;
to have an advanced law degree (the JD is the asic degree, the LLM is the advanced degree);
to have legal practice experience that would be commensurate with having actual expertise in an area of law.
Of course, a law degree from a place like Harvard is a big plus, and even more important is that he was on the law review there.
Sadly, the standards are often relaxed for liberals and minorities, especially when they teach courses with an ideological bent.
Law school teaches you two things: how to look things up and how to write persuasively. Usually, law school professors have actually practiced law. (E.g., my constitutional law professor was Anthony Kennedy before he was elevated to the Supreme Court. My securities professor was the head of the Securities Fraud Unit at the Dept of Corporations.) I guess a newly-admitted lawyer could teach, but he’d have to teach out of the books, because he’d have no practical experience at all.
Then you know what they call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his medical school class. A similar thing applies to JDs.
I remember the day one professor at my Law School made a point about something or another. A student piped up that another professor maintained the contrary was true. Without missing a beat the first professor, who had served as a JAG officer, and made partner in a mid-sized law firm before he began to teach, shot back: "Oh yeah, where is he licensed to practice law." The second professor had gone straight from clerking for a Judge to teaching, ans wasn't an attorney.
That infamous President of the USA, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton also became a law school professor straight out of law school. Perhaps, we need to take this as a warning signal not to vote for a particular candidate.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. < /joke >
It was above his paygrade to actually practice law.
Nobody knows.
In 1991 Barack Obama was a black man who was also president of Harvard Law Review.
That made him the most sought-after law school graduate in America.
The University Of Chicago has its own prestigious law school as well as a number of prestigious interdisciplinary programs that are on the lookout for diverse and accomplished faculty members.
The University Of Chicago knew that Barack Obama had worked in the summer for the white-shoe law firm of Sidley & Austin and that he would be a major player in Chicago's black elite.
So they offered him a do-nothing second job as junior lecturer in the law school.
He would be paid by the University Of Chicago to show up for a few hours a year to talk on civil rights issues to brand-new law students.
They did this in the hope that as he became a mover and shaker, his association with the school would benefit the school, help it with fundraising, with recruiting the best minority students for diversity purposes and perhaps lead to an older and highly accomplished Barack Obama becoming a full professor at the law school, further enhancing their diversity profile.
I remember two law professors who I think didn’t have real world experience (this was late 1970’s). One was a young woman fresh with an LL.M. The other was a white male who was politically connected. I had the former as a prof, but not the latter.
I didn’t think the prof I had was very good. Never heard anything pro or con about the other.
It’s not particularly unusual. Quite a few of my professors had little or no real-world experience practicing law. Some law students love the whole law school atmosphere and never really leave it. Teaching a few hours a week is a pretty easy gig. When I was a third-year student, I ran into an acquaintance who had graduated a few months earlier. When I asked him what he was up to (and why he was still hanging around the school), he said, in a somewhat arrogant tone, “I’m a professor now!” Turned out that he was a Barry Obama-style lecturer in some minor course. Beats working, I guess.
So he WASN’T a “professor”, just a lecturer. Talk about padding a thin resume.
Great point!!
I guess I am searching to find if it is actually proper that Obama refers to his past work as a Law Professor. From most of the remarks here, I assume he is within the bounds of propriety.
If I were a PG3 Surgery Resident and giving instruction to students, I would never be presumptous enough to refer to myself as a professor. Perhaps Assistant, perhaps assistant instructor (informal title), but never as a formal title to put on my resume some day.
Does the fact that Michelle was an Associate Dean factor in at all?
I had a couple of profs who had little to no real world experience though they did do judicial clerkships. They were fine on theory but had little to contribute to the pragmatic practice of law. My criminal law prof was a Harvard graduate who clerked only and whose lectures were completely in the theoretical realm. Only at the end of the course did he explain that his lectures were such because he expected most of us would do little in actual criminal work and would probably most likely end up as judges rather than criminal attorneys. That was probably accurate but I am lousy at advising on criminal matters. Our other criminal law professor (the one I didn’t get) had been a long-time Ventura County Prosecutor before he joined the faculty. He taught almost entirely practice rather than theory.
Obama claims to be a Constitutional Law professor. My con law professor was a Supreme Court judicial clerk, former attorney with a white shoe firm and a future Solicitor General under Reagan. He taught both theory and practice, and very well, I must say. Constitutional Law is a major core course in law school and it is not typical to entrust such a course to a neophyte graduate, even of Harvard. I suspect Obama lectured from time to time on a specific focus of con law, like civil rights, in a seminar class or something but I’m fairly certain he would not have taught the basic course.
According to his bio on Wikipedia:
Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988 and at the end of his first year was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review based on his grades and a writing competition.[18] In his second year he was elected president of the Law Review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the law review's staff of 80 editors.[19] Obama's election in February 1990 as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles.[19] He graduated with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991 and returned to Chicago where he had worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.
&
Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, as a Lecturer for four years (1992–1996), and as a Senior Lecturer for eight years (1996–2004).[24]
&
In 1993 Obama joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 12-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.
Barack Obama *pops*
It is heavily referenced, so I assume it's true and I would further assume the answer to your question would be Illinois.
The theory is that ANY licensed lawyer can teach a first year law class. ALL lawyers are supposed to know the core curriculum basics.
The real fact is that there are serious quota hires for minority black men as law professors.
Nobody knows.
"In 1993 Obama joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 12-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002." - Wikipedia
A man with an ego so big (he has already written two autobiographies) it blots out the sun, but if you look behind you see he leaves no shadow, just empty words slowing dissipating in the wind.
Your code is too complex; all it needs is an endless loop declaring “affirmative action”.
You are wrong. In the case of JDs, they are called "your honor".
Obamination’s pathway has been well greased by his elder comrades for many years, with an eye to placing him in the honor chair of bringing America to it’s knees.
If the American people go along with this, they are no longer a people who will fight for our precious freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And all those valiant men who have died to perpetuate those freedoms will have died in vain!
You are dead-on, but I would add that in addition to the do-nothing job, they offered him an office in which he could work on his autobiography, for which he’d received an advance. Actually, the advance was for writing a book on race relations, which UC Law probably thought would look good coming from UC, also. Of course, the book turned out to be all about him, like pretty much everything he says and does...
It's pretty rare. The standard path for lawyers going into academia usually involves a few years of clerking or working in private practice, then transitioning back to teaching.
Obama was more of an adjunct professor- he taught a class on the side. This isn't uncommon in law schools, especially in areas where the schools want to bring in someone to teach real-world legal skills (negotiation, trial-practice) instead of legal theory.
I believe Obama taught constitutional law, which is unusual. But he was editor-in-chief of Harvard's law review so, in all fairness, that puts him at the top of the list of potential law school professors.
(I can understand letting the license lapse in 2004 - he has no interest in ever really being a lawyer.)
(I can understand letting the license lapse in 2004 - he has no interest in ever really being a lawyer.)
I have had 3 experiences:
1) Most of my law professors had experience. Hearing their war stories made the class exciting and interesting. New lawyers might be hired to teach legal writing; that was considered a way to get onto a law faculty if you didn't have a lot of experience.
2) I worked in a law library of what is probably a top 5 law school. To my surprise, students often complained that professors had no real experience; everything was book learning.
3) When I went back for an LLM in Tax, I had the choice of going to a higher tiered school, where most faculty had never practiced before the Tax Court and a regionally-known school, where the profs were active tax lawyers. I chose the latter. Tax work isn't theory - I needed to know the ins and outs of tax practice and I wasn't going to get that from some ivory tower theoretician.
As McCain is going to show Obama, experience matters!
The Presidency is also above his pay grade.
The theory is that ANY licensed lawyer can teach a first year law class. ALL lawyers are supposed to know the core curriculum basics.
The real fact is that there are serious quota hires for minority black men as law professors.
In all fairness, it probably happened because he was editor-in-chief of law review at Harvard. That position let him build up relationships with professors at plenty of prestigious law schools around the country.
The sense I get with Obama is that he is a master at meeting the right people and leveraging those relationships into personal gain. It's a valuable skill in life, especially for someone like Obama whose professional resume is pretty thin.
Well he was editor of the Harvard Law Review after having only one published article written. In fact, that’s all he has written that was published while at Harvard.
Seems like those Harvard standards are pretty low to let someone who hasn’t proven they can write act as THE EDITOR of the Law Review.
I am quite sure it is as fish as it smells.
I am reminded of Rush Limbaugh's comments from last night: that Obama complained about McCain's campaign slogan of "Country First" as a slap at his imaginary patriotism, when it was really part of the message McCain has been crafting about when and how he learned to truly put country first.
In other words, Obama thinks everything is about him, always.
Great question.
There's this
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