User talk:Justmeherenow/9

Baird, who was then dean of the law school, took another shot at hiring Obama as a professor. Obama, who was in the midst of successfully running for the state Senate, once again declined. But he did accept the law school's offer to become a senior lecturer--then a title held only by Posner and Easterbrook--and teach a reduced course load of three classes per year.

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He was a huge hit with his students. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, which reviewed students' evaluations of Obama's courses, he was almost always rated one of their favorite instructors during his time at Chicago. Given the subject matter of Obama's courses, one might assume that students in the classes--which were electives--would have been disproportionately liberal. But Chicago's reputation for producing law professors tended to mitigate against that. "Anybody who's thinking they want to go into academia, conservative or liberal, kind of knows they have to take equal protection," says Kenworthey Bilz, who took equal protection from Obama in 1997 and is now a professor at Northwestern Law School. "I can very confidently say he didn't strike me as liberal or conservative."

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Saul Levmore, the school's current dean, whose politics are hard to characterize but generally right-leaning, says, "We were intensely interested in him. We were looking for him to say, 'I'm giving up politics, I want to be an academic.' We were always in recruiting mode with him."

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"What I know from my dealings with him at the law school is that he does really attempt to understand the points of view of other people who look at the world or a particular issue differently than he does," says Fischel. "He's much more intellectual, much more thoughtful, much more interested in discussion, debate, and dialogue than the typical politician. And that gives me some confidence about him, even though from my perspective he's much too liberal. I've never voted for a Democrat in my entire life. He's the first one I might vote for."

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=86dd0277-c6ee-4e3c-83e9-0bb468c5c40d