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Twenty-five years ago today, the New York Times ran its first profile of Barack Obama. On February 6, 1990, it announced (in a headline that's now pretty dated), "First Black Elected to Head Harvard's Law Review," and explained that the 28-year-old's new role was considered the "highest student position" at the school.

When Barack Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, he faced a heated battle with the law school's Women’s Law Association (WLA) because women comprised only 25% of the editors selected for the Review during his tenure. At that time, the Review’s president (with the help of two other editors) oversaw the selection of the new editors of the journal. All Harvard Law students were eligible to apply to the Review at the end of their first year by entering its writing competition, which involved editing an article and/or writing a case comment. New editors were chosen through one...

Posted By Bryan Preston On October 10, 2012 @ 8:29 am In media,Politics | 52 Comments The Daily Caller has a disturbing story up today. The outline goes like this: The moderator of Thursday's vice presidential debate is Martha Raddatz of ABC News. She is the network's senior foreign correspondent, and she is the sole moderator of the veep debate, which will center on foreign policy.Raddatz has a connection with Barack Obama going all the way back to their days at Harvard. They worked on the Harvard Law Review together, and Obama attended her 1991 wedding. Fast forward to the...

It isn't socialism that explains Obama's dismissive "you didn't build that" remark toward people of talent and individual initiative; it's the culture of affirmative action. As I listened to Obama's silly, if not pathetic, comments, I was reminded of nothing so much as the comments and attitudes of people like him: the so-called "multicultural" affirmative-action students one encounters in colleges and universities. Obama became president of the Harvard Law Review (HLR) without ever having an article published in it, a status that separated him from every other HLR president who preceded him. In fact, while Obama was the HLR's first...

I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about "Barry." Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn't even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him he didn't have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position. He...

Barack Obama stares silently at a wall of fading black-and-white photographs in the muggy second-floor offices of the Harvard Law Review. He lingers over one row of solemn faces, his predecessors of 40 years ago. All are men. All are dressed in dark-colored suits and ties. All are white. It is a sobering moment for Obama, 28, who in February became the first black to be elected president in the 102-year history of the prestigious student-run law journal. The post, considered the highest honor a student can attain at Harvard Law School, almost always leads to a coveted clerkship with...

On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard Law Review. This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors. One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of their respective speeches in Denver. In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard, this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge. Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact:...

DEVELOPMENTS - BOOKPROOFS 05/12/03 – 10:03 AMDEVELOPMENTS IN THE LAWTHE LAW OF MARRIAGE AND FAMILY"Great families of yesterday we show,And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who."DANIEL DEFOE, THE TRUE-BORN ENGLISHMANpt. 1, l. 374 (1701)."[G]roups that have historically been the target of discrimination cannote expected to wait patiently for the protection of their human dignity and equal rights while governments move toward reform one stepat a time."Vriend v. Alberta, [1998] 1 S.C.R. 493, 559 (Can.) (Iacobucci, J.)."The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other."DENIS DIDEROT, Observations on...