BARACK OBAMA NOT EXACTLY IN FAVOR OF FREE SPEECH AT HARVARD

At Harvard law School in 1991, Obama approved of restricting speech to protect minorities

http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/08/at-harvard-law-school-in-1991-obama-approved-of-restricting-speech-to-protect-minorities/

Daily Caller – Charles C. Johnson - 10/8/2012

The 1991 Harvard Law School yearbook quoted the future President of the United States virtually shrugging his shoulders at the thought that non-liberal white students might take offense at restrictions on speech that minority students found objectionable. “I don’t see a lot of conservatives getting upset if minorities feel silenced,” Obama said, flipping the argument around.

In addition to Obama, who was by then the former Harvard Law Review editor, the panel included several prominent Harvard law professors; the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal director; Justice Stephen Breyer, who then presided over the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; and Brian Timmons, an Obama classmate who had been the managing editor of the Harvard Journal on Law and Public Policy, which describes itself as “the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.”

Charlie Oellermann, another Harvard Law School classmate, did not share Obama’s politics at the time. But the two took the same first-year criminal law class.

“My broader impression of the HLS environment in the fall of ’88 was that I didn’t know whether or not these people had ever heard of Reagan,” Oellerman told TheDC. “I thought the world had moved past the Socialist world view, but I guess that was a pipe dream on my part.”

Harvard law students on the far left at the time, he said, had “totally unpracticable ideas for society.”

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