If a transition tells you something about a president's style--if not his chances of success--then Bill Clinton and Barack Obama could hardly be more different. Clinton was often at his worst as president-elect. Key rules were overlooked (Hillary spent weeks flirting with a cabinet job before learning that anti-nepotism laws precluded it) and key setbacks were self-inflicted (gays-in-the-military shot up Clinton's to-do list after an offhand comment to Andrea Mitchell). Clinton spent so much time assembling his cabinet that he only had three weeks to hire senior White House staff. All in all, the process betrayed a stunning disregard for Washington protocol. Which was how the Clintons wanted it. Hillary had decreed that no Washington insider would get a job that could be filled by a friend or loyalist.
Obama's transition was a contrast in almost every respect. His political decisions were free of sentiment or ego (who else would grant Joe Lieberman a reprieve?). His tactical maneuvering bespoke a reverence for Washington institutions (which is how GOP moderates like Olympia Snowe found themselves bathed in presidential attention). He rolled out his team with brutal efficiency and stocked it with Beltway know-how. Even his public pronouncements were strikingly spare. In December of 1992, Clinton staged a two-day, 20-hour economic summit, every minute of it broadcast on C-SPAN. In late 2008, Obama briefly fielded questions after closed-door meetings while his brain trust looked on sternly.
What accounts for these differences? There's no doubt a characterological component--Obama's self-control is nearly inhuman, Clinton's is famously lacking. But part of the explanation also lies in the elite institutions that socialized them--namely Harvard and Yale, their respective law schools. The two schools stand on opposite sides of a cultural chasm in the academic world. Even more than that, they stand for different theories of governing.
Lanny Davis, the former Clinton White House aide and law school classmate of Bill and Hillary, likes to tell a story about his first day of property class at Yale. The professor, Charles Reich, asked students to write down the words "fee simple" and briefly explained the concept. Then, after a long pause, he instructed the students to drop their pens. "OK everybody, this is the last time you'll ever hear me talk about 'fee simple' or anything else that Harvard Law School teaches. The new title for this course is, 'The intellectual, moral, ethical, and political implications of property ownership in America.'"
Reich was an extreme case, to be sure. He'd authored the counterculture manifesto The Greening of America and had a pedagogical style to match his shaggy hair and ratty jeans. But, at Yale, he was not such an outlier. Whereas Harvard prided itself on instilling discipline, Yale believed its mission was to unlock students' innate brilliance in an atmosphere of freedom, intimacy, and intellectual ferment. Harvard was, in certain respects, a three-year hazing ritual. Yale was more like a three-year Renaissance Weekend. Its graduates had been reassured of their eclat from the moment they set foot on campus.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Yale's heterodox style was what attracted Clinton in the first place. As biographer David Maraniss has observed, Clinton hewed to two criteria in selecting a law school: that it be prestigious, and that it let him get a jump on his political career. "Nowhere could this be done more surely than at Yale," writes Maraniss. Clinton spent his first two-and-a-half months in law school more or less out of law school, working as an operative for a liberal U.S. Senate candidate. When the campaign ended, he threw himself at the mercy of the first sympathetic classmate he could find, a woman named Nancy Bekavac. Maraniss recounts the exchange:
"Hi, I'm Bill Clinton. Can I borrow your notes?"
"For what?"
"For everything."
"Are you in our class?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, where the hell've you been? We've been here since September!"
Bekavac soon relented--partly because of Clinton's charm, partly because Clinton was hardly unique. One classmate spent all three years working full-time for the mayor's office in New York City. Another was so burnt out by political work when he got to Yale that it was a year and a half before he showed up to class.
By the time Clinton showed up himself, he would have found it a less than harrowing experience. Harvard students spent their first year in massive lecture halls puzzling over obscure court decisions. Yalies spent much of their first year in cozy seminar rooms debating the Western world's prevailing legal institutions. (Yale's class of roughly 200 was about one-third the typical Harvard class.) The future Yale dean, Guido Calabresi, ran his torts course as an inquiry into the public policy benefits of risk-spreading. The criminal-law professor Joe Goldstein was constantly prodding his students for more rational ways to punish violent offenders.
And that's when the students actually took law classes. The law school awarded credit for any graduate-level course in the entire university. The actor and commentator Ben Stein, a fellow alumnus, took a course from The New Republic's own Stanley Kauffmann--a giant of film criticism, but rather a dilettante on the law of contracts.
Though Yale had its share of more orthodox faculty, students tended to resist them, often with impunity. Stein recalls in a 1996 Washingtonian article how two classmates literally blew smoke--from cigars--at a criminal-law professor they found tedious. Stein had his own showdown with an antitrust professor named Gordon Spivack. Spivack employed the traditional Socratic approach, meaning he'd randomly select a student to state the facts of a case, then answer a series of questions intended to highlight the underlying legal issues (and, many students felt, to tie them in knots). When Stein's turn came, he protested that he'd had enough of Spivack's "hiding the ball and the whole Socratic method." Spivack demanded his name, to which he replied, "Stein, but you can call me Benjy." For good measure, he threatened to disrobe if Spivack persisted. Stein traces his selection as class valedictorian (an honor bestowed by popular vote) to this rebellion.
Spivack later decamped for a white-shoe firm in Manhattan. The traditionalists who stayed reconciled themselves to this brave new world of student entitlement. In the fall of 1968, the students held a referendum on the school's grading system, which they rejected by the Castro-esque margin of 15 to one. (One typical refrain: "Abolish Grades! Remember--Richard Nixon was third in his class at Duke Law School!") The faculty dutifully obliged, voting over winter break to make first-semester courses pass/fail. When students of J. William Moore, the brilliant but fastidious expert on civil procedure, returned for their second semester, they expected feedback on their exams. Instead, Moore simply turned to the class and shrugged, "This is a tough country club to get into. But, once you're in, you're in. You all passed."
As president, Clinton was everything you'd want from a good Yale Law student: creative, deep-thinking, engrossed by public policy. But his White House was chaotic and its ambition often outstripped its knowledge (think health care reform). At Yale, Clinton once began a corporate law exam half an hour late because it was open book and he didn't have the text. And still he did shockingly well on it. It's not a bad metaphor for his entire administration.
The only hint as to why Obama chose Harvard over other elite law schools is a small biographical detail: When applying, Obama reportedly declined to identify his race so as not to gain any advantage. One imagines the twentysomething Obama hungry to test himself with the most epic challenge possible. It's certainly the way he conducted himself upon enrolling. Biographer David Mendell notes that Obama quickly claimed a place in the law school library and planted himself there each day for hours.
Some of the most vivid images of Harvard Law School come care of Scott Turow, the legal-thriller writer who attended in the mid-1970s and published a memoir of his first year called One L. The Harvard that Turow describes is a forbidding and savagely competitive place. It features huge, anonymous classes (the Socratic method having been invented there, allegedly as a way to turn a profit by teaching en masse); students who hoard precious volumes in the library; professors who brave slush and snow outdoors rather than share a tunnel with students. Exam time is its own unique horror show--a flurry of outline-making and book-devouring in which weeks-long, 16-hour-per-day regimens are typical.
Turow got an inkling of what awaited on his first day of his contracts class, when the much-feared Professor Perini set his sights on a student named Karlin. (Turow uses pseudonyms, but his account is nonfictional.) To Turow's surprise, Karlin held his own while Perini spewed forth a series of trick questions, stopping only to make the odd joke or menacing gesture. But Turow's heart sank when someone said Karlin had spent the summer reading Perini's "hornbook"--a dense supplementary volume.
Harvard was by all accounts a less stodgy and more humane place when Obama arrived some 15 years later. Beginning in the late '70s, the faculty had undergone a decade-long evolution that made it a hotbed of "Critical Legal Studies" (CLS). The "Crits" applied a kind of Marxist analysis to the law, arguing that seemingly neutral rules had been erected by elites to preserve their social and economic privileges. The students, too, had become much more activist-minded. They'd occupy the dean's office with gleeful regularity to protest, say, the lack of faculty diversity. Even the curriculum had begun to change. For decades, each first-year class had been divided into four "sections" of 130 to 140 students, who shared a single set of courses and professors. In the '80s, Harvard made one of the sections "experimental," which helped students see connections between subject matters and exposed them to other perspectives, such as economic analysis of the law.
And yet Harvard hadn't changed that much. The competition remained intense. The sections were still enormous and, for the most part, highly impersonal. (One day in Professor Kathleen Sullivan's class, a student took an absent classmate's seat upon finding a large coffee dispenser in his own chair. Sullivan, who prided herself on memorizing her classroom roster, promptly whiffed on the displaced student's name.) Many professors still faithfully practiced the Socratic method. In a long GQ feature from the early '90s, John Sedgwick described how some campus radicals would tone down their answering-machine greetings and class up their attire when the big corporate firms came to town. "L.A. Law"--was there a more bourgeois show on television?--was wildly popular among students, who'd gather to watch and point out plot holes.
As it happened, Obama's first-year section was the most conventionally taught of the bunch. "We felt as if we had the hardest, worst, most inflexible section," says a former classmate, David Dante Troutt. "We felt like a control group in the presence of folks receiving the revolutionary new drug." This atmosphere sometimes brought out the worst in the class: Contracts professor Ian Macneil once arranged a meeting to discuss a line in his textbook some had complained was sexist; the students spent most of the hour pumping him for exam information.
It's not that Obama's professors discouraged policy discussions; they just focused them tightly around the legal issues at hand. Suppose you'd sued a contractor for shoddy repair work, then amended your complaint to cover more repairs. A relevant discussion might be whether the new complaint runs afoul of the statute of limitations--since it was filed later--or why such statutes even exist. An irrelevant consideration, jokes David Shapiro, Obama's well-liked civil procedure professor, is "whether the massacre of Armenians in Turkey was a genocide." Early on, he says, students "want to bring in their own life experiences in ways that are in themselves interesting, but which don't have much to do with what we're talking about." Shapiro's job was to rid them of that habit. This is the kind of thing people mean when they say "thinking like a lawyer."
The orthodoxy of Obama's first year coincided with a decline in the Crits' influence after a bruising tenure battle the previous summer. Obama would have shed few tears. A classmate remembers him constantly pleading with Roberto Unger, a CLS ringleader who taught an upper-level course, to "bring the theorizing back down to earth." In The Audacity of Hope, Obama recalls worrying that Harvard "represented the abandonment of my youthful ideals, a concession to the hard realities of money and power--the world as it is rather than the world as it should be." But a part of him believed accepting these realities was central to making progress.
Obama excelled at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude and, of course, making law review along the way. At Yale, law review conferred little prestige. Anyone interested in joining could submit a short article. (The process isn't much more intense today.) At Harvard, hundreds competed for a few dozen spots on the basis of grades and a several-day-long exam covering legal writing, editing, and style rules.
The law review attracted students of all ideological stripes. But, by disposition, they were invariably the most square. One testament to this was a law-review institution known as the "outline closet," which housed detailed notes on almost every class. The outlines were believed to possess mystical grade-boosting powers and were passed down from one generation to the next. It was, of course, forbidden to share them with the law school lumpenproletariat. (The Crits may not have been right in their analysis of the law, but they were clearly onto something about law review.)
The review elected its president by way of a paleo-reality show, in which the full membership eliminated candidates through several rounds of voting until only the winner remained. The process could easily run ten or twelve hours and was rife with intrigue. The other finalist Obama's year was a fellow liberal named David Goldberg. As the now familiar story goes, the conservative faction threw its support behind Obama, whom they thought would at least hear them out.
If the law review was a college of cardinals within the law school, then its president was the pope. And overseeing him was a secular god named Erwin Griswold. Griswold had served as dean of the law school for 20 years beginning in the 1940s. He'd taken particular interest in the law review, and his influence over the institution far outlived his deanship. Until his death in 1994, Griswold expected the president to send him the new issue by the tenth of each month with a letter distilling its contents. Within a few days, the dean would send back a detailed critique--a so-called "Grizzer-gram"--opining on the merits of the articles. The president was to take scrupulous note of Griswold's likes and dislikes.
Succeeding at these tasks offered great rewards. A president who earned the Grizzer's imprimatur would be a lock for a Supreme Court clerkship. But the stress this placed on generations of law-review presidents could be oppressive. (Dan Kahan, who ran the law review two years before Obama, actually developed an ulcer.) Many would go to extravagant lengths to appease their patron. If, for example, an issue was running late, they might construct a special issue (circulation: one), which they'd send Griswold while finishing the real thing.
Obama was hardly a law-review zealot. Unlike his colleagues, he maintained a life outside Gannett House, the review's iconic building. But he had an abiding respect for law-review custom. He once spent hours adjudicating a vicious internal debate over whether a colleague could publish in a rival journal, a violation of protocol. Month in and month out, he'd pen a letter to Griswold, then have Griswold's response posted in the law review's main room.
But what Obama's law-review presidency mostly demonstrates is that he'd absorbed the dispassionate, conservative, relentlessly logical mode of analysis a Harvard legal education was meant to convey--and which was the hallmark of his mostly tidy transition. Midway through that year, a colleague named Scott Siff was struggling through what seemed like his twenty-seventh draft of an article on international law. Siff felt each successive edit had made the piece more left-wing, until it had become a screed about how federal courts were trampling human rights. Finally Obama weighed in and politely suggested it had gone off the rails. "Barack pushed it way back to center," Siff recalls. "He said, 'You've gone so far left you're not going to be credible. ... You have to approach it in a more balanced way--in a way that doesn't alienate everyone.'"
Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic.
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COMMENTS (35)
I'm no Yalie--I'm not anything, actually--but I don't think you gave the Yale experience a fair shake, Noam. You start off by comparing the nearly opposite pedagogical methods the two law schools employ, but in very vague terms, and then you go to cite Obama's experience. I'm not sure how this represents some overarching evidence that Democrats in general are warmer to the Harvard method. Rather, the point you seem to be making is that Harvard Law grads are better at winning over despondent conservatives. If you want to make the point that Democrats prefer the Harvard method, I suggest bringing in some more examples.
I'm no Yalie--I'm not anything, actually--but I don't think you gave the Yale experience a fair shake, Noam. You start off by comparing the nearly opposite pedagogical methods the two law schools employ, but in very vague terms, and then you go to cite Obama's experience. I'm not sure how this represents some overarching evidence that Democrats in general are warmer to the Harvard method. Rather, the point you seem to be making is that Harvard Law grads are better at winning over despondent conservatives. If you want to make the point that Democrats prefer the Harvard method, I suggest bringing in some more examples.
This essay is rich for what it tells us both about Obama and legal education. It is the most significant piece I found on Inauguration Day, hustling internet sources for more background on the remarkable American who managed to become president. His skill set for understanding dynamics of institutional relationships and politics and making effective "moves" and his synthesis of complexities toward decisions that are well-considered were apparent even in law school. Thanks to TNR for investing in this timely research and analysis. I'll remember to keep my eyes on my online NEW REPUBLIC menu . . .
This essay is rich for what it tells us both about Obama and legal education. It is the most significant piece I found on Inauguration Day, hustling internet sources for more background on the remarkable American who managed to become president. His skill set for understanding dynamics of institutional relationships and politics and making effective "moves" and his synthesis of complexities toward decisions that are well-considered were apparent even in law school. Thanks to TNR for investing in this timely research and analysis. I'll remember to keep my eyes on my online NEW REPUBLIC menu . . .
A very nice informative piece. It's clarity belies the work that must have gone into it.
A very nice informative piece. It's clarity belies the work that must have gone into it.
The west coast has its own H/Y thing going on, with Berkeley playing the part of Harvard (hard to believe, but true) and Stanford playing the part of Yale.
The west coast has its own H/Y thing going on, with Berkeley playing the part of Harvard (hard to believe, but true) and Stanford playing the part of Yale.
"Hillary had decreed that no Washington insider would get a job that could be filled by a friend or loyalist."
And Bush followed that example to ruinous consequence: Bremer, Brownie, et al.
"Hillary had decreed that no Washington insider would get a job that could be filled by a friend or loyalist."
And Bush followed that example to ruinous consequence: Bremer, Brownie, et al.
I graduated from HLS, and it was a lot more like Yale than this article indicates. Harvard managed to be cutthroat and impersonal while still giving us an entirely policy-based education. I never learned what fee simple was either, and I graduated without really knowing any law. There are certainly differences between Bill and Barack, but Harvard and Yale didn't cause them.
I graduated from HLS, and it was a lot more like Yale than this article indicates. Harvard managed to be cutthroat and impersonal while still giving us an entirely policy-based education. I never learned what fee simple was either, and I graduated without really knowing any law. There are certainly differences between Bill and Barack, but Harvard and Yale didn't cause them.
very interesting piece. didn't attend either institution but know grads from both who didn't emanate the kind of vibes one would expect based on the article. so would harvard instilled some discipline in bill clinton? obama nonetheless seems to be able to kick back, though his cabinet appointments make his administration to be Clinton III.
very interesting piece. didn't attend either institution but know grads from both who didn't emanate the kind of vibes one would expect based on the article. so would harvard instilled some discipline in bill clinton? obama nonetheless seems to be able to kick back, though his cabinet appointments make his administration to be Clinton III.
How is Berkeley like Harvard and Stanford like Yale? I don't understand. I went to Berkeley and Harvard and did not find them very similar at all.
How is Berkeley like Harvard and Stanford like Yale? I don't understand. I went to Berkeley and Harvard and did not find them very similar at all.
This piece is hugely entertaining, but silly. A Michigan Law graduate myself (took contracts from Lee Bollinger), I spent time at Harvard Law as a visiting student. I was most astonished at how ordinary the education was by comparison to Michigan, probably because the professors at Michigan had a much deeper commitment to education than those at Harvard who had a lot of other things going on. All I could think was, "This is Harvard?"
I then went into practice with one of the most prestigious Wall Street law firms, populated by Harvard grads (including some I knew while at Harvard), Yale grads, a few Columbia, and a smattering of others like me. All had been at the tops of their classes or ... view full comment
This piece is hugely entertaining, but silly. A Michigan Law graduate myself (took contracts from Lee Bollinger), I spent time at Harvard Law as a visiting student. I was most astonished at how ordinary the education was by comparison to Michigan, probably because the professors at Michigan had a much deeper commitment to education than those at Harvard who had a lot of other things going on. All I could think was, "This is Harvard?"
I then went into practice with one of the most prestigious Wall Street law firms, populated by Harvard grads (including some I knew while at Harvard), Yale grads, a few Columbia, and a smattering of others like me. All had been at the tops of their classes or they would not have been at this firm. The only differences that I ever noted between the Harvard and Yale alums was that the Yalies were, on average, a bit smarter. But that's because the admissions at Yale are more competitive than Harvard. They were that way when they got there. This did result in a slight but perceptible imperiousness, but in practice there were no meaningful differences amongst any of the lawyers that anyone could have attributed to law school. There may be some difference in the self-selection of who attends Harvard v Yale (insiders v outsiders), but this piece surely overstates that difference.
Mr. Scheiber wonders why Obama "chose Harvard over other elite law schools." Is there any evidence that he was accepted at Yale and chose Harvard? Or did he "choose" Harvard because he didn't get into Yale? Yale's "yield" rate reportedly is 80%, that is, 80% of the applicants accepted by Yale chose to attend. Was Obama in the 20% who turned Yale down?
Mr. Scheiber wonders why Obama "chose Harvard over other elite law schools." Is there any evidence that he was accepted at Yale and chose Harvard? Or did he "choose" Harvard because he didn't get into Yale? Yale's "yield" rate reportedly is 80%, that is, 80% of the applicants accepted by Yale chose to attend. Was Obama in the 20% who turned Yale down?
I went to BU and had a CLS guy for property. Imagine having a commmunist teaching property! When I studied for the Bar, it was like learning property for the first time. That CLS property professor is now at Harvard and is teaching property so the CLS folks probably still have sway over there. That being said, all the upper tier law schools spend more time teaching policy than what the law is. The best advice for law students is to not bother learning what the law is until you take the bar. Instead, learn what your professor thinks the law ought to be and focus in on that in your exams. Also, I don't buy this Harvard v. Yale thing. I know people from both schools and they are who the ... view full comment
I went to BU and had a CLS guy for property. Imagine having a commmunist teaching property! When I studied for the Bar, it was like learning property for the first time. That CLS property professor is now at Harvard and is teaching property so the CLS folks probably still have sway over there. That being said, all the upper tier law schools spend more time teaching policy than what the law is. The best advice for law students is to not bother learning what the law is until you take the bar. Instead, learn what your professor thinks the law ought to be and focus in on that in your exams. Also, I don't buy this Harvard v. Yale thing. I know people from both schools and they are who they are and don't fit into this analysis.
If attending these prestigious law programs is anything like medical school then they are filled with late night cramming; early morning hangovers; intense debate; and second guessing of one's self, classmates, and professors. In essence the experience is a blur and one survives. I don't think the idiosyncratic teaching method of each institution makes the doctor. It was quite clear before we even started our clinical training, who was headed for a surgical career and who would be a psychiatrist. Clinton and Obama were well formed before they set foot on their respective campuses.
If attending these prestigious law programs is anything like medical school then they are filled with late night cramming; early morning hangovers; intense debate; and second guessing of one's self, classmates, and professors. In essence the experience is a blur and one survives. I don't think the idiosyncratic teaching method of each institution makes the doctor. It was quite clear before we even started our clinical training, who was headed for a surgical career and who would be a psychiatrist. Clinton and Obama were well formed before they set foot on their respective campuses.
Agreed. NS is badly informed at best regarding the character of the schools, particularly given the period when Obama was in school. Obama arguably is more influenced by the ethos of U of Chicago (where he spent time after Harvard).
Agreed. NS is badly informed at best regarding the character of the schools, particularly given the period when Obama was in school. Obama arguably is more influenced by the ethos of U of Chicago (where he spent time after Harvard).
It is interesting that Disillusioned Harvard received an entirely policy-based education at HLS. I was there when Griswold was dean, and policy arguments were considered bad form. I didn't find it cutthroat, merely very, very cold and impersonal. It was commonly said that the Griz thought that having a personality was a waste of time, and passed on the characteristic to much of the faculty.
The upside was an emphasis on careful, deliberative thought and well articulated statement. Was it worth three years of misery and ego destruction? On a personal basis for me, the book is open. But the system did deliver us a president who is a clear thinker and free from cant and dogma. So in retr ... view full comment
It is interesting that Disillusioned Harvard received an entirely policy-based education at HLS. I was there when Griswold was dean, and policy arguments were considered bad form. I didn't find it cutthroat, merely very, very cold and impersonal. It was commonly said that the Griz thought that having a personality was a waste of time, and passed on the characteristic to much of the faculty.
The upside was an emphasis on careful, deliberative thought and well articulated statement. Was it worth three years of misery and ego destruction? On a personal basis for me, the book is open. But the system did deliver us a president who is a clear thinker and free from cant and dogma. So in retrospect I'm proud of HLS even though I was generally unhappy there. And I met my wife (still married, more than 40 years later) at a HLS mixer.
As for fee simple, it's pretty basic and my guess is that DH learned what it is without admitting it.
I am a graduate of Yale Law School and a law professor. This article's portrayal of legal education at Yale is completely reductive and patently false. The discussion of cozy seminar rooms and abstract conversations about the ethical and moral implications of the law are worlds away from my experience at YLS. Certainly, we had challenging discussions of policy and theory, but we also were taught legal principles (perhaps not in the same rigid proportions as our Cantabrigian brethren, but still...). And while we were not privy to the massive, Socratic-oriented lectures that Scheiber suggests characterizes the HLS experience, we weren't hanging out in sleeping bags braiding each other's ha ... view full comment
I am a graduate of Yale Law School and a law professor. This article's portrayal of legal education at Yale is completely reductive and patently false. The discussion of cozy seminar rooms and abstract conversations about the ethical and moral implications of the law are worlds away from my experience at YLS. Certainly, we had challenging discussions of policy and theory, but we also were taught legal principles (perhaps not in the same rigid proportions as our Cantabrigian brethren, but still...). And while we were not privy to the massive, Socratic-oriented lectures that Scheiber suggests characterizes the HLS experience, we weren't hanging out in sleeping bags braiding each other's hair either. In my first year contracts class, our professor regularly cold-called and used the Socratic method. Although some classmates spent time away from campus, most of us endured quotidian life in New Haven and at the law school.
This is not to say that YLS and HLS are not different -- they are, and purposely so. But the differences are not as vast as Scheiber suggests, and certainly do not amount to an impoverished or haphazard legal education.
Obama's ability to master institutional frameworks and excel within them is one of his great skills; his time at Harvard is a great illustration of this, as this piece makes abundantly clear. However, the argument that differences between Yale and Harvard law schools illuminate differences between Clinton and Obama is pop-psychology journalism at its facile worst; the idea is put forth as fact and then not rigorously explored. Not least, any comparative examination should highlight that Clinton attended Yale Law School at the height of post-60's institutional disarray and Obama attended Harvard Law School at the height of Reagan-era return-to-core-curricula reform. Is the contrast betwee ... view full comment
Obama's ability to master institutional frameworks and excel within them is one of his great skills; his time at Harvard is a great illustration of this, as this piece makes abundantly clear. However, the argument that differences between Yale and Harvard law schools illuminate differences between Clinton and Obama is pop-psychology journalism at its facile worst; the idea is put forth as fact and then not rigorously explored. Not least, any comparative examination should highlight that Clinton attended Yale Law School at the height of post-60's institutional disarray and Obama attended Harvard Law School at the height of Reagan-era return-to-core-curricula reform. Is the contrast between their educations more generational than institutional? It's a point worth exploring for anyone seriously interested in the differences between Clinton and Obama, even if it would rob the current writer of his sensational attention-grabbing headline.
As a lawyer who went to a state law school but practices with lawyers from both Harvard and Yale, I can say that graduates of both law schools have their heads up their asses, but Harvard lawyers less so.
As a lawyer who went to a state law school but practices with lawyers from both Harvard and Yale, I can say that graduates of both law schools have their heads up their asses, but Harvard lawyers less so.
Good article. I almost feel sorry for all the pasty law review presidents who thought they might be Obama, but ended up being law review president forever in some anonymous corner office.
Good article. I almost feel sorry for all the pasty law review presidents who thought they might be Obama, but ended up being law review president forever in some anonymous corner office.
The Socratic method invented at Harvard Law School? I'm sure they'd love to think so, but Plato probably has another view.
The Socratic method invented at Harvard Law School? I'm sure they'd love to think so, but Plato probably has another view.
Wonderful, informative article. But where does the real invisible hand of the Obama administration play in: the University of Chicago?
Wonderful, informative article. But where does the real invisible hand of the Obama administration play in: the University of Chicago?
Griswold reminds me of Grindelwald, naughty magician of Rowling fame.
Griswold reminds me of Grindelwald, naughty magician of Rowling fame.
The article makes me a bit nauseous that we ever elect anyone from either school.
The article makes me a bit nauseous that we ever elect anyone from either school.
I can't say that the dichotomy presented by this article (which, I might add, is something of a journalistic cliché) is accurate.
YLS was only superficially laid-back. The former dean, Guido Calabresi, used to tell the first-year students in his opening address that "It's time to get off the treadmill." That was a masterpiece of hypocrisy although I'm sure he wanted to believe it. You simply don't accept 170 ultra-competitive people (and Yale is harder to get into than Harvard) and expect them to tone it down. The competitiveness merely was cloaked by a false demeanor of cultivated apathy because a display of raw competitiveness was not the done thing.
The first semester was pass/fail a ... view full comment
I can't say that the dichotomy presented by this article (which, I might add, is something of a journalistic cliché) is accurate.
YLS was only superficially laid-back. The former dean, Guido Calabresi, used to tell the first-year students in his opening address that "It's time to get off the treadmill." That was a masterpiece of hypocrisy although I'm sure he wanted to believe it. You simply don't accept 170 ultra-competitive people (and Yale is harder to get into than Harvard) and expect them to tone it down. The competitiveness merely was cloaked by a false demeanor of cultivated apathy because a display of raw competitiveness was not the done thing.
The first semester was pass/fail and grades after that were vague and unpredictable. It was considered bad form to ask to see an exam that had impressed the teacher if yours, after God knows how much studying, had been deemed to merit only a "Pass." As noted in the example about Moore in the article, it's not as if students didn't want feedback; it usually was denied. Professors played hide-the-ball with relish.
As they couldn't always compete on the basis of grades, students competed for everything else: The most prestigious activities, the best jobs (sometimes the highest number of job offers and "flyouts"), the best clerkships. Professors who professed not to find grades meaningful suddenly found them terribly important if you approached them for a recommendation. And they often would want your entire transcript, presumably so they could gauge whether you were a horse worth backing. Having distinguished yourself in his/her class was not sufficient. As with every institution, there were favorites, a situation aggravated by the fact that Yale in general did not use anonymous grading and who you were and how much you sucked up did matter. A great deal.
Nor was the law journal process a cakewalk, unless you think a 20-to-40 page article is "short" or that passing a 60-page style exam that 60% of the students failed the first time is easy. The student editors who made the selections were often arrogant assholes and after the students were accepted the real competition began: applying for masthead positions, which often took the form of a campaign not unlike the one I've read Obama waged at HLS.
It is true that in general Yale was more policy-oriented and even more blatantly contemptuous of the real-life practice of law than Harvard (not that contributions from wealthy law firm partners and executives aren't vigorously solicited all the time), that it sometimes failed to teach substantive law (Hillary failed the bar the first time, this is not unheard of for a YLS student.)
But a Renaissance Weekend it was not. I sincerely doubt that Bill and Hillary's YLS was all that different despite the tie-dye shirts and peace symbols.
This article is trash. First, to suggest that the law schools Bill Clinton and Barack Obama attended explain their different approaches to the Presidency is simply absurd. Both of these men had plenty that shaped their character and approaches to leadership outside of their three years spent in New Haven and Cambridge, respectively. Second, while there are differences between the student bodies and the academic experiences at YLS and HLS, the author falls so far into hyperbole that the article misleads rather than informs. Yes Yale Law School probably focused more on policy and theory than any other elite law school, and yes Yalies are less likely to aspire to be traditional practitioners (g ... view full comment
This article is trash. First, to suggest that the law schools Bill Clinton and Barack Obama attended explain their different approaches to the Presidency is simply absurd. Both of these men had plenty that shaped their character and approaches to leadership outside of their three years spent in New Haven and Cambridge, respectively. Second, while there are differences between the student bodies and the academic experiences at YLS and HLS, the author falls so far into hyperbole that the article misleads rather than informs. Yes Yale Law School probably focused more on policy and theory than any other elite law school, and yes Yalies are less likely to aspire to be traditional practitioners (given the state of the legal profession, can you blame them?). But Yale still teaches doctrine, and all schools worth a salt teach policy--lawyers are meant to play a public role, after all, although many that fit the imagined Harvard-mould in this article seem to forget that in their pursuit of billables at corporate law firms. I took torts from Guido Calabresi, and of course he taught us about policy and risk-spreading, but it was also a black-letter, common-law course--just one that happened to be taught by one of the keenest, most creative minds in the field (not to mention one of the most compassionate, wonderful people I've ever met—and, contrary to what many "real lawyers" seem to believe, compassion is in no way at odds with intellectual rigor or dealing in the "real world," and many, though not all, YLS professors take pains to emphasize this). And as for the implication present throughout the article that YLS is a self-indulgent, detached haven for pie-in-the-sky intellectuals who have no interest in how the world really works--well, I can't print the words that come to mind. YLS students spend more time working in the "real world" than any other law school. Students can participate in clinics their first year. I have friends who have worked with prisoners, contributed legal services to immigrants, set up a local bank, and I had the privilege of traveling to the West Bank to carry out human rights research. Which is more useful, real clinical work that helps real people, or wasting hours per day working on law review?--the very idea of students acting as gatekeepers and commentators for scholarly work is absurd, and the whole institution of law review is a colossal waste of time, not to mention a money-wasting scheme carried out by bestowing the magical Blue Book with some imaginary cloak of utility.
HLS '98. One of the 20% who were admitted and passed on Yale for Harvard which has an 80% yield for admits who matriculate as well.Since Noam is bascially stereotyping. here is my take. The biggest difference b/w the two Law Schools is networks. HLS has the business school, Kennedy School of Government and Medical School that are also top rank. Yale does not. So Obama's network was stronger and most of his closest friends went to HLS or Harvard's other Grad Schools. Check the bios of his appointees (sub-cabinet level). Moreover, the African-American students and network at Harvard (across all grad schools) is incomporable. No other school is even close. All in all, Harvard provided some of h ... view full comment
HLS '98. One of the 20% who were admitted and passed on Yale for Harvard which has an 80% yield for admits who matriculate as well.Since Noam is bascially stereotyping. here is my take. The biggest difference b/w the two Law Schools is networks. HLS has the business school, Kennedy School of Government and Medical School that are also top rank. Yale does not. So Obama's network was stronger and most of his closest friends went to HLS or Harvard's other Grad Schools. Check the bios of his appointees (sub-cabinet level). Moreover, the African-American students and network at Harvard (across all grad schools) is incomporable. No other school is even close. All in all, Harvard provided some of his key networks but his style is clearly more U of Chicago. Fact based, rigorous and drama free. Harvard brings swagger plus drama and a comeptitve desire to keep points and win. Yale produces more pontificators who love to hear themselves talk for the art (and self-pleasure) of it.
A lot of guys at my high school went to both Berkeley and Harvard, and may or may not have discerned a difference between them. It's no big deal.
A lot of guys at my high school went to both Berkeley and Harvard, and may or may not have discerned a difference between them. It's no big deal.
So how do you explain the prominent role of YLS grad Jamie Rubin (son of Bob) in setting up the new Obama team?
So how do you explain the prominent role of YLS grad Jamie Rubin (son of Bob) in setting up the new Obama team?
I'm a first-year student at HLS. I've read One-L, and it's surprising that it describes the place I go to school everyday. That said, one of my professors was a student at the school about 10 years ago, and found the place hostile, cold, and uncaring.
It seems that both the passage of time and our extraordinary outgoing Dean Elena Kagan (who is leaving to become Solicitor General) have made a tremendous difference.
We've switched to Pass/Fail (actually Honors/Pass/Low Pass/Fail) grading. Today, there are seven sections of 80 students each rather than four sections of 140 (I think this occurred just before Dean Kagan's tenure).
I think what I've been most struck by is how friendly and dow ... view full comment
I'm a first-year student at HLS. I've read One-L, and it's surprising that it describes the place I go to school everyday. That said, one of my professors was a student at the school about 10 years ago, and found the place hostile, cold, and uncaring.
It seems that both the passage of time and our extraordinary outgoing Dean Elena Kagan (who is leaving to become Solicitor General) have made a tremendous difference.
We've switched to Pass/Fail (actually Honors/Pass/Low Pass/Fail) grading. Today, there are seven sections of 80 students each rather than four sections of 140 (I think this occurred just before Dean Kagan's tenure).
I think what I've been most struck by is how friendly and down-to-earth most of my classmates are. There are no gunners in my section, and I have yet to meet a person who studied 16 hours a day for exams.
The balance between abstract policy and black letter law varies by professor—one of our profs focused on doctrine in an incredibly straightforward way; another more or less substituted a completely different course of his own invention for one of the standard first year classes.
While I think this article provides a fascinating history of the two institutions, it seems that both HLS and YLS are different places today than when Obama and Clinton were each students.
Neither a lawyer nor Ivy; enjoyed the article but have the same reservations as expressed above. In my undergrad & graduate classes at various undistinguished institutions I encountered a handful of professors who aggressively used the Socratic method, and I came to see it as the most effective way to teach. Better in smaller classes than huge lecture halls; everyone should have their turn in the barrel.
Neither a lawyer nor Ivy; enjoyed the article but have the same reservations as expressed above. In my undergrad & graduate classes at various undistinguished institutions I encountered a handful of professors who aggressively used the Socratic method, and I came to see it as the most effective way to teach. Better in smaller classes than huge lecture halls; everyone should have their turn in the barrel.
I graduated from Harvard Law less than a decade after Obama, and my experience with HLS was that it was in no way a 3-year hazing experience. The first semester -- yes; but after that, when initial grades came back [keep in mind that there's absolutely no feedback prior to first-semester exam results] and there was no real correlation between hard work and grades (most of us got our best grades in our worst classes), people collectively took a sigh of relief, saw that they could make a B+ in a course without killing themself, and things got noticeably less stressed. By second year, the place was full of parties, we had a swinging social scene, and times were good. We graduated in a time when ... view full comment
I graduated from Harvard Law less than a decade after Obama, and my experience with HLS was that it was in no way a 3-year hazing experience. The first semester -- yes; but after that, when initial grades came back [keep in mind that there's absolutely no feedback prior to first-semester exam results] and there was no real correlation between hard work and grades (most of us got our best grades in our worst classes), people collectively took a sigh of relief, saw that they could make a B+ in a course without killing themself, and things got noticeably less stressed. By second year, the place was full of parties, we had a swinging social scene, and times were good. We graduated in a time when there were plenty of on-campus recruiters and lots of job offers for all. The faculty was pretty evenly split between Socratic and non-Socratic professors, and it was easy enough to avoid the former after one's required first-year courses were behind them. Many of Harvard's professors do take their stature very seriously, and they walk about like kings & queens holding court (though there are exceptions, of course). I actually worked on the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, which had the first floor of Gannett House (right under the Law Review up on the second floor), and to me, the Review members were a wildly mixed bunch, though all of them were the most uniformly hard-driven (and often the most humorless) at HLS. I agree that it speaks a lot about Obama's work style that he excelled within the confines of the Review. To me, that is where this article gets its thesis right. As for Yale vs. Harvard, keep in mind that Yale Law graduates have the highest first-time Bar failure rates of any Top 10 Law School graduates, so a little substance mixed in with the theory might not be so bad. And given all of the US's current pressing issues, isn't the approach of a disciplined "Harvardian" Obama quite useful?
I was a member of the Yale Law School class of 1984, so I was there a few years after the Clintons. The description of Yale and the education by the author is an amusing caricature. Yes, we did have an elective course called, "Myth, Law and History," but generally, the professors used casebooks and gave tests requiring application of law to a particular set of facts. We did focus (probably more than most law schools but similar to Harvard) on the public policy behind law -- that focus has been practical and valuable in my practice of law, particularly on the more difficult cases. The rigorous part of the education (our grades were Pass/Fail the first semester and then a modified Honors/Pa ... view full comment
I was a member of the Yale Law School class of 1984, so I was there a few years after the Clintons. The description of Yale and the education by the author is an amusing caricature. Yes, we did have an elective course called, "Myth, Law and History," but generally, the professors used casebooks and gave tests requiring application of law to a particular set of facts. We did focus (probably more than most law schools but similar to Harvard) on the public policy behind law -- that focus has been practical and valuable in my practice of law, particularly on the more difficult cases. The rigorous part of the education (our grades were Pass/Fail the first semester and then a modified Honors/Pass/Fail after that) was the intense writing requirement--basically, two publishable papers individually tutored by a Yale professor. My experience was working and learning with an incredibly gifted group of people (both faculty and students), and I expect that both President Clinton and President Obama feel the same way about their experience.
In your sentence, "As the now familiar story goes, the conservative faction threw its support behind Obama, whom they thought would at least hear them out," "whom" should be "who": 1) "thought" is an intransitive verb; it cannot take an object ("whom"); 2) the verb phrase "would hear" requires a subject ("who").
In your sentence, "As the now familiar story goes, the conservative faction threw its support behind Obama, whom they thought would at least hear them out," "whom" should be "who": 1) "thought" is an intransitive verb; it cannot take an object ("whom"); 2) the verb phrase "would hear" requires a subject ("who").
All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia (at Penn Law)
All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia (at Penn Law)
You need to clarify that while President Obama may not have identified his race in the HLS application form, he also needed to submit a personal statement that would have most likely described his bi-racial background and international experiences. Also, with a name like Barack Obama, it would appear easy to infer that he had an exotic background. It is misleading to portray as more meritorious a minority applicant who chooses not to check the race box in applications. I am certain that Barack Obama was as qualified as any student who has been admitted to HLS and he proved it by his performance. But, I resent the implication that he was a better applicant for not having stated his race i ... view full comment
You need to clarify that while President Obama may not have identified his race in the HLS application form, he also needed to submit a personal statement that would have most likely described his bi-racial background and international experiences. Also, with a name like Barack Obama, it would appear easy to infer that he had an exotic background. It is misleading to portray as more meritorious a minority applicant who chooses not to check the race box in applications. I am certain that Barack Obama was as qualified as any student who has been admitted to HLS and he proved it by his performance. But, I resent the implication that he was a better applicant for not having stated his race in the application. I would love to see his personal statement and find out if he expanded on his background in that required part of the application. Many applicants (minority and non-minority) use this portion of the application to highlight their background, including networking and family connections, both of which are very important for admission to HLS and Yale. John Edwards’ daughter was at HLS during his primary run for the presidency. HLS and Yale love to admit students from political, financial, or elite power structures (in their geographic areas or nationally). They admit a large number of students with political experience or aspirations (such as Bill Clinton). These students add to the schools' network.
Ironic isn't it, that with all their financial and brain trusts, neither school can seem to solve an obvious vehicle parking problem for their students. It doesn't bode well for the country.
Ironic isn't it, that with all their financial and brain trusts, neither school can seem to solve an obvious vehicle parking problem for their students. It doesn't bode well for the country.