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Obama Takes His Own Law ExamsHow did he do?

By Emily Bazelon
Posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008, at 7:02 PM ET
Barack Obama. Click image to expand.

Could this guy really be running for president? I asked myself this question about Barack Obama after reading his, at turns, quite angry memoir Dreams From My Father. I'm asking it again today after reading through the exams he gave when he was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago—and in particular the model answers he wrote up for his own questions.

It's not that the book or the class materials scream fomenting liberal or fomenting anything. If they did, you'd have heard about it already. These writings are tempered and thoughtful and sophisticated and nuanced, as the law professors asked to comment on the exams point out on the Web site of the New York Times, which posted the exams. Obama either kept sharp or out-there views out of the classroom because he had an eye on his political future or because he wanted to make sure his students felt comfortable expressing opposing ideas. (For what it's worth, most of the professors I took classes from in law school did the same, at least in front of the lectern.)

But even more than his memoir, Obama's exam answers offer complex ruminations on some of the most contentious social and legal questions out there. Can a state pass a law barring doctors from treating unmarried couples for infertility, with a special slap at gay couples embedded in the statute? Can a city in which black students are failing open a special career academy for black boys?

Can a presidential candidate really afford to sail into these roiling waters, however skillfully? Obama gets away with it—if he does, come November—primarily because … law exams are hard! The questions are long fact patterns that branch out in all directions. The answers rely on tracking the facts through a series of doctrinal moves and countermoves—this Supreme Court case sends me north, but then this other one turns east, or is that ruling heading upside down? You can write a lot that's descriptive rather than proscriptive. As in, "The courts have never recognized unmarried persons as a 'suspect class.' "

At one point, Obama asks his students to sound off about their own policy views. But after asking whether the hypothetical "Ujamaa School" for black boys is "good public policy," he doesn't write out his own potentially enlightening model answer. Instead he retreats to finding it "interesting" that a slim majority of students came down on Ujamaa's side, "based on a justifiable skepticism in the prospect of truly integrated schools and an equally justified concern over the desperate condition of many inner city schools." Isn't it lucky that cagey politics is consistent with respectfully deferring to students' views?

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
Photograph of Barack Obama by NEWSCOM.
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