Obama's First Presidency

"There is one abiding mystery about Obama's legal career. Although (as his books attest) he is a fine writer, he never put his name to any article, anywhere. But it was a time when the very ambitious had become very cautious: Robert Bork had been denied Supreme Court confirmation on the strength (in fact, the weakness) of his earlier writings, and the mysterious David Souter passed muster only because he had written nothing that Democrats on the Senate's judiciary committee could sink their teeth into (to Republican fury, he turned out to be a closet liberal). Perhaps young Barack decided to leave no hostages to fortune in a career trajectory that could take him to the Supreme Court - or to the White House. Or perhaps he was too busy with his humble work in and for poor commu nities to bother about reshaping a legal system that he had come to believe would inevitably serve the powerful."