Kyron Huigens (Cardozo) published an op-ed on law.com today:  Barack Obama, Legal Scholar:

I think I know Obama’s mind. He’s like me — a legal scholar.

Obama is a graduate of one of the best law schools in the country and has taught on a part-time basis at one of the others. Every law school produces at least one scholarly journal, usually its flagship journal, that is edited by students. Obama was the president of the Harvard Law Review, a political office of sorts that, nevertheless, gave him an opportunity to work with accomplished, often brilliant, scholars.

Obama’s legal education, his law review work and his teaching have produced a presidential candidate whose positions on major issues have been described as nuanced, compromised, centrist or insincere. They might be all or some of these things, but many of them are also legally sophisticated. This matters to anyone who wants to truly understand Obama’s thinking. Legal analysis cannot be adequately portrayed in political terms, and to push Obama’s beliefs back and forth along the conventional left-right spectrum badly misrepresents them. …

[T]he anti-intellectualism of his opponents — people who think George W. Bush’s C-average is a good thing — makes it politically dangerous to explain complex issues in complex ways. And the conventions of political reporting in this country — which emphasize the horse race instead of the substance of campaigns — make it almost impossible to get this level of detail across to the public. All we have to go on is a consistent pattern of positions that sophisticated legal arguments make sense of. …

None of this really justifies my sense that I know Obama’s mind. But beyond these issues and the way he handles them, I sense a certain temperament and a style of thinking that sounds and feels very familiar. I would be surprised if many of my colleagues in legal academia did not sense it too. Whether this counts as a reason to vote for Obama is, of course, another question.

For a less flattering view, see Donald Kochan (Chapman), Obama’s Academic Credentials:

I do not dispute that he had a significant distinction teaching, as the University of Chicago recognizes.

But I think most academics expect people claiming to be academics (or former ones) to have some record of scholarship.

If you enter "au(obama)" in the Westlaw "Journals and Law Reviews" database, which is the means to find articles authored by the name in parentheses, you get nothing. Zero results; no articles.

Entering "Obama" in a search of the Social Science Research Network ("SSRN"), a place where most academics place their published scholarly works, retrieves zero results. Again, no articles/no scholarship.

I really don’t care much if our politicians are academics or not. But, if they do claim to be so and lack the traditional elements of serious scholarship, that is a problem.

(Hat Tip:  Nemo Dat.)