Obama's Paper Chase

"For one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led attempts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws used by Republicans in the South to crowd blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.
"For another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.
"'I remember thinking, "you’re offending my liberal instincts,"' Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled."

Jodi Kantor in The New York Times investigates Barack Obama's time teaching at the University of Chicago Law School