For the first time in its 130-yearold history, 27 years after it elected its first black president in Barack Obama and 41 years after the first woman, Susan Estrich, occupied the position, the prestigious Harvard Law Review elected its first black woman president, ImeIme Umana, a Nigerian.
Twenty-four-year-old Umana, the third-oldest of four daughters of Nigerian immigrant parents, was elected on January 29 by the review’s 92-student editors, as the president of its 131st volume.
Like other law reviews, the Harvard Law Review, often the most-cited journal of its kind, with the largest circulation of any such publication in the world, allows students to hone their legal writing skills and gives scholars a forum to thrash out legal arguments. Its presidency, considered the highest-ranking student position at the ferociously competitive law school, is a ticket to virtually anywhere in the legal realm. Half of the current Supreme Court justices of the United States of America served on the Harvard Law Review, though none as its president.
“It still feels like magic that I’m here,” Ms. Umana said in an interview, though her fellow students disagreed with her, saying that it was not magic at all, but her sharp legal mind, intense work ethic, leadership ability and generosity of spirit catapulted her to the top.
Ms. Umana’s emergence has also raised questions as to why it took so long for a black woman to reach the pinnacle of the review, and how her perspective may influence a publication that has for most of its existence been led by white men.
It’s been said that when Umana talks about the law, she speaks through the prism of her race and gender, and not far from her mind, were the black women, who in recent years died after encounters with law enforcement.
“I’m constantly reminded of people like Natasha McKenna, Tanisha Anderson and Sandra Bland, whose relationships with the law were just simply tragic,” she said. Unlike the vast majority of graduates of the nation’s top law schools, Umana says she has no interest in joining a high-paying corporate firm, adding that for now, her dream is to become a public defender, a goal she set after an eye-opening internship last summer in the public defender’s office in the Bronx, with plans to work this summer with the public defender in Washington.
“A lot of the clients I worked with that summer and since have looked a lot like me. They are disproportionately represented on the unfortunate end of the legal system, so it struck a little closer to home,” she said. Born in State College, Pa., Umana graduated from Susquehanna Township High School in Harrisburg, where her father, who died in 2010, was a statistician for the state.
She graduated from Harvard College in 2014, where she majored in government and African-American studies. Umana was elected president of the law review in an intense 12-hour period of deliberations that stretched over two days – typical for this annual process – and included a rigorous evaluation of each candidate’s portfolio of work and responses to a written questionnaire, questions at a candidate forum and a writing exercise.
She contested with 11 other candidates, amongst whom were eight minority students and eight women. “I think our team saw in her what so many people have seen in her for so long – that she’s a brilliant person, an unbelievably dedicated worker and an exceptionally caring leader,” said Michael L. Zuckerman, a third-year law student and the review’s previous president.
On why it took so long for the Review to elect a black woman as president, Umana believes the lag reflects a wide gulf between black women and law school – and the law in general, a profession in which minorities have historically been underrepresented.
“We’ve been systematically excluded from the legal landscape, the legal conversation, and we’re just now making some important inroads,” she said in her office at the law review.
The first black man graduated from the law school in 1869, Obama was not elected the first black president of the review, founded in 1887, until 1990.
The first women were admitted to the law school in 1950, and the gender gap at the school did not start closing until the late 1970s, when Ms. Estrich was elected president of the review.
