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<li><p>Different law reviews have different traditions. Back in my day, which wasn’t exactly Obama’s day, but wasn’t so long before it, Yale had a tradition of picking relatively weak Editors-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal was almost never the most impressive person on the staff. Harvard was different. Its process was a unique, multi-stage series of cage matches that made it very difficult for someone without serious universal respect to make it far into the process, and its structure gave the President a lot of power. Harvard Law Review Presidents were often egotistical jerks (never the case at Yale), but they were always intellectually impressive.</p></li>
<li><p>I was in that world. I only know of one other Harvard Law Review President from that general time period who didn’t clerk for the Supreme Court, and he also chose not to, taking a significant political job after law school. In addition, I shared a phone line with the top African-American law student in the country my year, and I got to speak to lots and lots of famous judges and lawyers who wanted to offer him a job. A Supreme Court Justice made him an offer when we were still 2Ls, and said the following: “When one of us offers a clerkship, the normal protocol is that you accept immediately. But you are in a unique position. You can clerk for any of us you want to, and I shouldn’t take that opportunity from you because I got to you first. So I’m not going to let you answer me now. I want you to take three days, talk to your professors, do some research, and decide whether you would rather clerk for me or one of the other Justices.” At the time, no one had ever heard of anything similar happening, and this was a generally conservative, anti-affirmative-action jurist. </p></li>
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<p>The world didn’t change enough in the years between this and Obama’s law school class for the first African-American Harvard Law Review President not to be the only law student in America assured of a Supreme Court clerkship.</p>
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<li><p>Relevance? Not a lot, really. Obama’s career at Harvard was anything but undistinguished. He turned his back on a lot to return to Chicago and grassroots legal work (and Michelle, I guess).</p></li>
<li><p>Corranged said in another post that Nate Silver is a Chicago alum. That will definitely increase the popularity of Chicago!</p></li>
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