Obama's Columbia Years (Could you spend 2 years at Columbia without classmates remembering you?)

I looked up that case note and I can’t find anything that authenticates it as his own work.

You wouldn't find anything in the Law Review itself; case notes never acknowledge authorship because they don't contain any original thought or analysis. It's just somebody announcing an 'important' decision and presenting the court's opinion in his or her own words.

It's perhaps more embarrassing that Obama wrote a case note and only a case note that it would be to say he wrote nothing at all. Both scenarios suggest he was lazy and wouldn't put in the time, but the case note suggests that he didn't have the analytical skills to write an article requiring critical legal thought and originality.

It's as if he was president of some academic graduate student physics honorary at MIT and, when all of the other members presented original and complex experiments as demonstrations, Obama showed up with a baking soda and vinegar volcano.

And, no, I've never seen a copy of the letter from Harvard Law Review.

I am familiar with the anonymous publication of case notes. My point was to say that we have no verification, other than some political hacks, saying they saw a letter about it. If it turns out he doesn’t even have this to his credit, its all the more embarrassing and preposterous how this charlatan got as far as he did with the most prestigious law school and law review in the country. Extending your MIT analogy, it would be like he showed up wearing knickers and knee-hi’s and said “aw shucks, I don’t have nothin’, but kin I play wit you’all anyway?”

One more bit. To get on law review at any law school, you usually have to submit a thoroughly researched original legal memorandum on a topic selected by the qualifications committee. I can’t say for sure if Harvard had anything like that at the time, but isn’t there anything with his name on it that they could have dug up?

There doesn't appear to have anything else with Obama's name on it, unless Harvard kept Obama's submission to write onto HLR.

HLR already had a process in place to make certain a sufficient number of female students made it onto law review - things were not done with total anonymity.

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