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Obama the Lawyer PresidentHow would he choose judges?

By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 6:12 PM ET
Barack Obama. Click image to expand.

If Barack Obama gets to be president, he's not going to outsource the law. As a former constitutional law professor, he hasn't got it in him to wave off this aspect of his potential administration. Obama knows too much for that. And he would care too much about striking the balance he wants on liberty and security, continuing to straighten out the Justice Department, and nominating his idea of good judges to delegate these activities and check back in only to give his blessing.

The yawning gulf here is between Obama and President Bush, who has clearly relied on Dick Cheney and others to shape his administration's approach to law and the judiciary (with far happier results, from his point of view, than Bush's big moment of intercession, when he chose Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court himself). But Obama's approach to legal policy and the DoJ and judges also may distinguish him from John McCain, who is not a lawyer—and from Hillary Clinton, though for different reasons.

Obama's immersion makes the law professors in his inner circle giddy. In addition to the sweet relief of a candidate who has promised not to keep marching to the drummer of executive power, and who wants to protect rather than diminish the right to privacy, the Obama lawyer team loves their man because he goes toe to toe with them. As Harvard law professor Martha Minow puts it, "He has at his fingertips the whole historical context of the moments in which our Constitution has been stretched, or has been in jeopardy, and when presidents have tried to bring it back. This isn't an afterthought for him: 'Oh, I'll go consult my lawyers.' "

For Minow, this was driven home by an exercise in speechwriting. She and fellow Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal, and University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein were supposed to work up a draft of a big speech for Obama about law and democracy. The four of them—titans, all—labored over multiple drafts, which they sent back and forth among themselves. Then they and other law professors arrived at Obama's office. After apologizing because he hadn't reviewed their version, he reeled off four points he thought the speech should make. And Minow says they were better than what her quartet had come up with—not just more politically resonant but better conceived. Obama still hasn't given a big democracy and law speech, but he has made his points—about opposing rendition of detainees to other countries, for example—in a variety of settings.

Hillary Clinton, too, is an accomplished lawyer with precise and honed views of the Constitution. It's hard to imagine she wouldn't be in the thick of the big and medium-sized decisions, either. But she's not been as forthcoming about this aspect of her plans for governing. Clinton's campaign didn't return my repeated phone calls and e-mails, either this week or the last time I wrote on the topic. In a published Q & A with the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage, both Clinton and Obama did offer plenty of specifics—about how the Bush administration has overreached on executive power, among other things. But only Obama named the legal thinkers he's consulting.

Katyal, who has been called in by both senators, described what sounded like a typical establishment vs. insurgency split between the two. Clinton "comes at it a bit more from a top-down perspective," he said, "as in, 'elites are likely to know what the right answer is.' She'll likely talk to the Nobel Prize winner, but maybe not be as likely to talk to the people on the ground affected by the policies." Obama, on the other hand, talked to Katyal for two hours when the Military Commissions Act, which sought to limit the Guantanamo detainees' right to bring appeals in federal court, was being debated in the Senate. He wanted to know how the proposed law would play out directly for the detainees, and Katyal was representing Salim Ahmed Hamdan before the Supreme Court.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
Photograph of Barack Obama by Sean Gardner/Getty Images.
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