CLF Auction Prize Gives Students a Chance to Write an Op/Ed with Prof. Geoffrey Stone

Around a table at Le Petit Paris last month, four Law School students pitched Professor Geoffrey R. Stone their ideas for taking over his Huffington Post column for a day. Maybe, they asked him, they could write something on the role of third parties in American politics? Or the privacy vs. security dispute between Apple and the government? Perhaps they could focus on constitutional challenges to President Obama’s immigration policies, or address the Chicago Police Department’s use of secret cellular tracking systems?

Stone listened to their ideas and asked questions. “You decide,” he told them. “Send me a draft.”

Outside the restaurant, the students—Samuel Jahangir, ’16; Benjamin Montague, ’17; Zeshawn Qadir, ’17; and Robert S. Sandoval, ’16—huddled. They needed both a compelling topic and something that would enable them to find common ground. The four had made a donation at the CLF Auction for this experience—a first-of-its-kind offering from Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Professor of Law—and they wanted their final product to be worthy of his blog spot.

“The hardest part for us wasn’t so much the writing of it, but the collaboration,” Jahangir said. “We come from different ideological standpoints. We wanted to make sure that we wrote something that all four of us—and ultimately, all five of us—could agree upon.”

In the end, the students wrote about immigration policy—the topic, incidentally, on which their views diverged most widely—and their op/ed piece, “Faithfully Executed: Obama’s Immigration Plan and the Supreme Court,” ran as Stone’s Huffington Post column on May 16. For all but Qadir, who had written for the National Law Journal in March, this was their first byline in a mainstream publication.

“It was great to see the final product and be able to send it to family and friends,” Sandoval said later, as the group gathered in Stone’s office to discuss the experience.

Added Qadir: “Being able to post something on the Huffington Post with this legend was just great.”

Of course, the project posed a bit of a risk for Stone, who always donates to the auction but had never put the authorship of his column on the block. What if the end result wasn’t very good? What if the students took a position with which he disagreed?

“That would have been awkward,” Stone said. “I did think about that, and I didn’t really have a good solution in mind.”

Fortunately, it wasn’t an issue. Although Stone provided meaningful edits, he was happy with their work. “They did quite well,” he said. “I was very comfortable posting it.”

He was pleased to have given the four men an opportunity to collaborate—something law students aren’t able to do as much as he’d like—and the students were happy to have had the chance to work with Stone outside the classroom. They also appreciated the collaborative process: despite diverse perspectives on a politically charged issue, the students managed to find a single voice that satisfied them all. 

“In Law School you do everything basically by yourself: you take exams by yourself, you write papers by yourself,” Montague said. “You don’t get the chance to write something as a group very often.”