President Obama: Law Libraries are Cool!

Well, its not a direct quote, and he wasn’t president then, but a posted picture on PunditKitchen has a photo of the President when he was younger, and those definitely are case reporters on the shelves.




Probably taken for the Harvard Law student newspaper or something? Unless its from U. Chicago, when he was a lecturer at the law school there (1992 - 2004, I believe I read recently). Either way, yes, he - and law libraries - are definitely cool.

Ah! It was from his Harvard student days - one of the hits on the first page of results when searching Google image for

obama “law library”

is this one:




from this story in the Boston Globe from January 28, 2007.

Its from the same photo shoot, and the caption indicates it was from Harvard. But the phrase “law library” in the article isn’t about the picture:

In the fall of 1989, when Obama returned to campus for his second year, students were protesting the lack of minority law school faculty. They staged sit-ins in the law library, camped outside the office of Dean Robert C. Clark, and carried signs that read "Diversity Now" and "Homogeneity Feeds Hatred." (Emphasis added)

Sit-ins in the law library? They didn’t cover how to handle that when I was in library school. (And couldn’t the smart kids at Harvard law have thought up a slogan more catchy than “Homogeneity Feeds Hatred”?)

Good thing the law library at Harvard has all these great chairs:



(From a great presentation at the 2000 ABA Bricks and Bytes conference by Terry Martin, director of the Harvard Law Library.)