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  Bending the Law

  Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2008 5:19 PM | By Chadwick Matlin

  We’re used to spintastic e-mails, but one from the Clinton campaign yesterday seemed especially dizzy. In an e-mail titled “Just Embellished Words,” the campaign wrote that "Sen. Obama consistently and falsely claims that he was a law professor” (which he has indeed done). The e-mail backs it up with links to Lynn Sweet and Hotline, both of which confirm that Obama was never a professor.

  Unsatisfied, we triple-checked with the University of Chicago, where Obama purports to have been a constitutional-law professor. Sure enough, he wasn’t exactly a prof. Obama is considered a senior lecturer at the university, but he was never a professor. According to the Law School’s press office, he was plenty qualified to be a professor, but he just didn’t have the time. Instead of making him a professor, they gave him the senior lecturer gig, which means he didn’t have to publish scholarly works (and therefore wasn’t on tenure track).

  Obama started teaching in 1993, when he taught a course called Current Issues in Racism and the Law. (He was a practicing lawyer at the time.) He taught a variety of courses every year through the 2003-04 school year, before he started campaigning in 2004 for his current Senate job.

  So, on principle, Clinton’s spin is right—when Obama says he’s a professor of law, he’s misspeaking. Consider us spun.

  Filed under: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama

About Chadwick Matlin

• Chadwick Matlin is the staff reporter for Slate's The Big Money, a new business site launching in the fall. He can be reached at Chadwick.Matlin+TH@gmail.com

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