Harvard Law Record
Published: Thursday, October 30, 2008
Updated: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 14:09
In five days, Senator Barack Obama '91 could become the the first African-American and the second Harvard Law School graduate (after Rutherford B. Hayes, Class of 1845) to be elected President of the United States.
If Obama is elected next Tuesday, it will not be his first historic election. Obama was the first African-American to be elected President of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. Obama's tenure as Law Review President was not without controversy. Indeed, an unusually low number of women were selected to be Review editors from the class of 1992, leading to considerable debate about the Law Review's selection policies and the importance of its affirmative action program, which at the time, was limited to consideration of race and physical handicap.
Obama personally responded to the controversy by writing a lengthy letter explaining both the Review's selection policy and his personal experience with affirmative action. The letter was published in Volume 91, Number 7 (November 16, 1990) of the Harvard Law Record. It is reprinted below in its entirety.
See the Obama letter printed by clicking here: http://www.hlrecord.org/2.4475/record-retrospective-obama-on-affirmative-action-1.577511?pagereq=1
1 comment:
To whom it may concern,
The Harvard Law Record has recently changed servers and the link in your article is no longer valid. The updated link is “http://hlrecord.org/?p=11263″.
Thank you,
David LeRay
Managing Editor of the Harvard Law Record
Post a Comment