“You could just tell that people were going to listen to this person, that they were going to follow him. He had this kind of calm about him that is quite remarkable for someone his age,” he said.

That kind of calm has carried him through numerous political victories—and might help him if he runs with Hillary Clinton in 2008, as some have speculated might happen if President Bush wins reelection in 2004.

Obama also possesses a formidable intellect.

“He’s extremely smart,” Wilkins said. “I was talking to Larry Tribe the other day, for whom Obama was a research assistant. Tribe had a mathematical background in college, but when they worked together on a paper on the theoretical application of mathematics to law, Larry said he was blown away by Barack’s theoretical intelligence.”

After graduating from HLS, Obama pursued opportunities both in the public and academic sectors. He worked as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago, fighting against employment and housing discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation with a small firm.

He also landed a post at the University of Chicago Law School, although he did not pursue a professorship, choosing to focus instead on politics—his first love.

Minow taught Obama in a course called “Law and Society.”

She remembers that Obama wrote his paper on “issues relating to individualism and community, resonant with his key-note address.”

Minow recalls Obama as a tremendously good leader of the Law Review.

“He ushered in an era of calm, harmonious professionalism and still found time to participate in reading groups and other student activities,” she wrote.

Wilkins added that classmates in Obama’s section “commonly thought of him as the most talented person in the section. People talked about him being on the national ticket even back then.”

“The only thing that people saw barring him,” Wilkins added, “was that nobody thought that you could have a name like that on the national ticket. But look at him now. It’s a name that you don’t forget.”

Even Dean of the Law School Elena Kagan came into Boston to see her “great alumnus” speak at the convention on Tuesday night.

“It was kind of like watching a star being born,” Kagan said, recalling Obama’s address. Kagan, who graduated from HLS just four years before Obama, said she knows the state senator “quite well.”

Kagan was a professor at the University of Chicago law school when Obama taught there as an adjunct professor.