OBAMARAMA

An Associated Press article out today takes a close look at Miner Barnhill & Galland, the Chicago civil rights law firm where Sen. Obama worked for nine years after graduating
from law school:

As the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama had his pick of top law firms. He chose Miner’s Chicago civil rights firm, where he represented community organizers, discrimination victims and black voters trying to force a redrawing of city ward boundaries.

…The firm of Miner Barnhill & Galland, many of whose members have Harvard and Yale law degrees, has a reputation that fits nicely into the resume of a future presidential candidate.

“It’s a real do-good firm,” says Fay Clayton, lead counsel for the National Organization for Women in a landmark lawsuit aimed at stopping abortion clinic violence. “Barack and that firm were a perfect fit. He wasn’t going to make as much money there as he would at a LaSalle Street firm or in New York, but money was never Barack’s first priority anyway.”

In terms of his work there, the article notes that he “wrote a major portion of an appeals brief on behalf of a whistleblower who exposed waste and corruption in a research project involving Cook County Hospital and the Hektoen Institute for Medical Research and alleged that she was fired in retaliation.”  Additionally:

Obama was part of a team of lawyers representing black voters and aldermen that forced Chicago to redraw ward boundaries that the City Council drew up after the 1990 census. They said the boundaries were discriminatory.

After an appeals court ruled the map violated the federal Voting Rights Act, attorneys for both sides drew up a new set of ward boundaries.