NYT on Obama: "As a Professor, a Pragmatist About the Supreme Court"

[steven johnson]

Barack Obama's approach to constitutional law is remarkably little understood. Colleagues and students characteristize hin as "a careful pragmatist with a limited view of the role of courts. . .minimalist (skeptical of court-led efforts at social change) and a structuralist (interested in how the law metes out power in society). . . . unwillingness to deal in abstraction, a constant desire to know how court decisions affect people's lives.
. . .wasn't interested in high theory at all. . .results-oriented, he retained an overall skepticism for what courts can accomplish, . . ."

He's been unpredictable and may continue to baffle.

In interviews, former colleagues and students say they have a fairly strong sense of the kind of justice he will favor: not a larger-than-life liberal to counter the conservative pyrotechnics of Justice Antonin Scalia, but a careful pragmatist with a limited view of the role of courts.


Mr. Obama believes the court must never get too far ahead of or behind public sentiment, they say. He may have a mandate for change, and Senate confirmation odds in his favor. But he has almost always disappointed those who expected someone in his position - he was Harvard's first black law review president and one of the few minority members of the University of Chicago's law faculty - to side consistently with liberals.

Former students and colleagues describe Mr. Obama as a minimalist (skeptical of court-led efforts at social change) and a structuralist (interested in how the law metes out power in society). And more than anything else, he is a pragmatist who urged those around him to be more keenly attuned to the real-life impact of decisions. This may be his distinguishing quality as a legal thinker: an unwillingness to deal in abstraction, a constant desire to know how court decisions affect people's lives.

Mr. Obama often expressed concern that "democracy could be dangerous," Mr. Stone said, that the majority can be "unempathetic - that's a word that Barack has used - about the concerns of outsiders and minorities."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=360352&single=1&f=21