This has come up enough times that I thought I should say something about it. Folk like to raise the Obama Harvard Law Review thing to prove scholarly level of intelligence and qualification. Thing is, I don’t think people have to do that. They should point to the fact that he went to Columbia and then went to Harvard and graduated magna cum laude. They should point to the fact that he was a teaching fellow (I guess an adjunct professor) in Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School. But what they don’t have to do is say he’s smart and qualified because he was voted president of the Harvard Law Review. Well, here’s why (link to Harvard Law Review):
The Harvard Law Review is a student-run organization whose primary purpose is to publish a journal of legal scholarship.
Let me really dumb down the comparison: it’s a student run magazine. Okay, yes they’re smart students and yes the content is smart content but being voted student president of the magazine club doesn’t prove how overly abundant smart a person is nor how overly abundant qualified either.
Student editors make all editorial and organizational decisions and, together with a professional business staff of three, carry out day-to-day operations. A circulation of about 8,000 enables the Review to pay all of its own expenses.
Well that’s a good circulation…definitely better than both of my blogs but it still doesn’t make a person overly abundant smart or qualified. Now I’m not saying Obama isn’t smart or qualified–I think that’s a weak charge to raise against the man–but I am saying that this isn’t the proof people want it to be.
The review even has a worthy goal that’s to be applauded:
Aside from serving as an important academic forum for legal scholarship, the Review has two other goals. First, the journal is designed to be an effective research tool for practicing lawyers and students of the law. Second, it provides opportunities for Review members to develop their own editing and writing skills. Accordingly, each issue contains pieces by student editors as well as outside authors.
In other words it’s a sandbox where students can develop their editing and writing skills.
Now I am being too hard on the Review–after all, its not so much that its a club but its a club that a person has to prove some worth to get into. You can’t just sign the dotted line and become part of the Harvard Law Review. So what does it take to become a member?
Membership in the Harvard Law Review is limited to second- and third-year law students who are selected on the basis of their performance on an annual writing competition.
In recent years, the number of students completing the competition has ranged from 200 to 255. Between 41 and 43 students are invited to join the Review each year.
Okay using the harshest numbers: 255 yearly competition completions, 16% make it onto the team.
Fourteen editors (two from each 1L section) are selected based on a combination of their first-year grades and their competition scores. Twenty editors are selected based solely on their competition scores. The remaining editors are selected on a discretionary basis. Some of these discretionary slots may be used to implement the Review’s affirmative action policy.
From that group, 14 editors from each 1L section are chosen based on scores and grades. 20 are picked only on test scores. The rest, no one knows what method will be used to pick them but they reserve the right to implement affirmative action.
If it were me, I don’t think I would use the Harvard Law Review to prove my point. I’d go back to the years of education, the level of performance as a teacher: the man is competent and smart–focus on that over the magazine club.
9 responses to “Obama: President of the Harvard Law Review”
I remember a time when three art majors formed a society and declared themselves Co-Presidents. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t qualify any of THEM to run this country. (Well, maybe that one Dominican guy…;))
I was president of my high school band, too. That and a nickel would get me five cents.
Well, if you were smart and a community organizer then we’d be having a whole different conversation.
Umm. You’re missing two things here. First, serving on law review is the most prestigious thing you can do in law school. It demonstrates commitment and intelligence. Second, being elected president of the Harvard Law Review is incredibly competitive and difficult. People who are elected president of the Harvard Law Review invariably go on to clerk for the Supreme Court and pretty much can do whatever they want. Hence, a little different than being president of your high school band. And, the blogger here obviously doesn’t understand the rigor and intensity involved in both getting on to law review and serving in that capacity as president.
The reason for the whole post is answering the second point. It’s a student run organization at Harvard Law.
As to the first point: It doesn’t matter if it’s the most prestigious thing you can do as a Harvard Law student. The question was in regards to using it to prove the intelligence of Obama. I say it’s better to use his track record as a professor than to say he was elected to the head of a student run organization (no matter how prestigious).
Probably need some stats to support your penultimate bit there.
Saying the Harvard Law Review is just a cute little ol’ student rag, is the equivalent of saying that the Olympics is entirely amateur, so it doesn’t matter. If Olympic atheletes were halfway decent they would be professionals. Right?
Wrong.
You are obviously not a lawyer, since any lawyer knows that the Harvard Law Review is the most prestigious legal journal on the planet.
Most prestigious in the planet? Maybe one of the legal journals on the planet but even then it’s not going to be better at English law than England. It’s one of the top legal reviews in the United States and is right up there with Yale.
And even then, once you leave the US and head to Europe, you’re not dealing with predominantly student run legal reviews either. You’re dealing with law journals run by academics.
All that aside, I don’t see how your point adds or detracts anything from my main point that citing the HLR as proof for Mr. President’s intelligence is wrongheaded when you can just point at his entire academic record. He’s a smart man.
20-30 people per year graduate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School (about 5% of the class), and often there’s a summa or two as well. There’s only one president of the Harvard Law Review every year. It’s a far more impressive credential than “merely” graduating magna cum laude.
The Harvard Law Review is, without question, the most important scholarly journal in American law — and in part because it has always been the best run. (I say this as a former top-of-the-masthead officer at a rival publication.) When it wants to publish an article, it gets that article. People have tried to establish peer-reviewed law journals for decades, and none remotely approaches the prestige of the Harvard Law Review.
I have known and worked with a bunch of former Harvard Law Review presidents, and not one of them (a) failed to impress me as being really, really smart, at least, or (b) was remotely the type of person who might win a popularity contest. More often than not, Harvard Law Review presidents were jerks, and the few non-jerks were even more intellectually impressive. I wish I could remember exactly what the HLR presidential selection process entailed, but I don’t. I only know that once upon a time I did know it, and back then I was impressed at how well it had been designed to avoid picking anyone mediocre. Harvard presidents tended to be the most intellectually commanding person in their years, excluding the complete space cadets. The Yale Law Journal, at least in my day, had a completely different tradition. The Yale editor-in-chief was never the most respected person on the editorial board, and the position usually went to a nice person who would handle administrative stuff and leave the scholars alone.
Being president of the Harvard Law Review was a full-time job, and then some. As the #2 person on my lesser law review, and someone who had rarely if ever missed a class voluntarily in my life, I was able to make it to about 70% of my class sessions during my tenure in office, and my study time was limited to 5-6 hours per class. I graduated in the top 10% of my class, but there was no way I could have kept my grades up to the Harvard magna standard. And, unlike Harvard, we did NOT manage to publish all our issues on time.
Leading a bunch of top students at an elite law school is pretty much a cat-herding sort of thing. Every one of your “subordinates” thinks he or she is God’s gift to humanity, and has proven skill in manipulating systems to come out on top. What’s more, it’s a rare Harvard Law Review board that does not contain dozens of people who make substantial contributions to the legal world in the decades after they graduate. These are people whose high opinion of themselves is objectively justified, uniquely so. The Harvard Law Review Board in my cohort included ten future Supreme Court clerks, several future federal judges, a future Fortune 500 CEO, a JD/PhD hired onto the Harvard faculty before graduation, a future Deputy Attorney General of the United States, a couple of future law school deans and maybe university presidents, the future COO of a major real estate empire, the future managing partner of one of the country’s largest and most successful firms . . . and none of them was the president (except that the president was one of the Supreme Court clerks).
There are very few credentials that say as much about a young person’s intellectual ability as being chosen president of the Harvard Law Review.
From what is written above, it would appear that the person who is elected president of the Harvard Law Review would have to be well known by several thousand students and faculty members who attended or taught his classes and who read his published works in law school. And yet I have only found one person who claims to have known Barack Obama at Harvard Law School. Why haven’t hundreds or thousands of former classmates or professors of Obama ever been identified and interviewed about what Obama was like as a student at Harvard?
Obama has written two books about himself which were bestsellers. Has anyone ever read a scholarly piece by this most brilliant of legal minds? Where might one find his scholarly writings? And if they can’t be found, why might that be? Just asking.