When Jaime Escuder, a University of Chicago law student, was searching for a professor to supervise an independent project on prisoners’ rights, he turned to Barack Obama, but not for his politics. As a student in Obama’s constitutional law class in 2001, Escuder was impressed by his teacher’s ability to see both sides of an argument. “I figured Obama would respect the stance I took in the paper, whether or not he agreed with it,” Escuder, now a public defender in Illinois, told me. In the project, Escuder forcefully advocated for prisoners’ having the freedom to procreate. Obama gave him guidance on honing his argument  but never told him if he agreed. When he did venture an opinion, it was to prod Escuder to consider real-world implications. On running into Escuder at the Hyde Park Co-op one weekend morning, Obama said: “I don’t think that you’re giving adequate consideration to how difficult it will be for prison officials to care for pregnant women. I’ve been dealing with this recently, and believe me, it isn’t easy.” Escuder assumed Obama was talking about being a father.

Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for a decade before he left in 2003 to run for the United States Senate. He emerged as one of the Senate’s most liberal members, and his voting record is often invoked in the current campaign, especially by his opponents. But the men and women who studied with him at Chicago echo Escuder’s observation that Obama was much more pragmatic than ideological. Even as his political career advanced, Obama’s teaching stuck to the law-school norm of dispassionately evaluating competing arguments with the tools of forensic logic. But Obama apparently was not attached to legal argumentation for its own sake. “It was drilled into us from Day 1 that you examined your biases and inclinations,” Richard Hess, now an attorney at Susman Godfrey in Houston, told me. “And then, when you made decisions, they were based on sound empirical reasons.” Escuder saw his professor as “a street smart academic”: “He wanted his students to consider the impact laws and judicial opinions had on real people.” According to Marcus Fruchter, who took constitutional law with Obama and now practices at the law firm of Schopf & Weiss in Chicago, “You never would have known he was going to be a liberal senator based on what he said in his courses.”

Obama’s rootedness in the real world shaped every aspect of his teaching. He laced his lectures with basketball analogies. When a student observed the death of Jam Master Jay of the hip-hop group Run-DMC by wearing the group’s trademark tracksuit to the racism seminar, Obama acknowledged the gesture with a nod and a smile. (“I can assure you, that would not have been a common response among the faculty at the University of Chicago,” Joshua Pemstein told me. He was in class that day and now practices at Foley Hoag in Boston.) Obama’s style resonated with students, who packed his classes despite the fact that his obligations as a state senator meant that when the Legislature was in session his courses were held early on Monday morning and on Friday afternoon. If his students begrudged the early risings and missed three-day-weekends, they didn’t take it out on Obama in their course evaluations: they routinely rated him as one of the best teachers at the law school.

Image Credit... Tom Van De Velde/University of Brighton, England

I recently spoke to many of Obama’s former students and asked them to speculate about how the teacher they saw manage a classroom might try to manage a country. Some students thought Obama’s teaching offers a more accurate glimpse of his potential presidency than the oft-cited statistic that he holds the most liberal voting record in the Senate. “I don’t think that there is a ‘teacher Obama’ and ‘politician Obama,’ ” said David Bird, who works at Reed Smith in Pittsburgh. “He came across as very practical and down to earth. I think that reflects who he is as a person and his experience organizing and in the legislature.” Dan Johnson-Weinberger, who lobbies for progressive causes in Illinois, agreed that his former professor isn’t likely to emerge as an ideological liberal if he indeed makes it to the White House. “Based on what I saw in the classroom, my guess is an Obama administration could be summarized in two words,” he said. “Ruthless pragmatism.”