Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C. (law firm)

In 1993 Barack Obama became a litigator of voting rights and employment cases with the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C. (a.k.a. Davis Miner), where he remains a Counsel to this day. In 1994 Obama worked for Davis Miner on a case titled Barnett v. Daley, where he was part of a legal team that sought to raise the number of black super-majority voting districts in Chicago from 19 to 24. According to the judge in the case, Richard Posner, the Obama team held that “no black aldermanic (city council) candidate in Chicago has ever beaten a white in a ward that had a black majority of less than 62.6 percent, and it is emphatic that the ward in which the population is 55 percent black is not a black ward -- is indeed a white ward, even though only 42 percent of its population is white.”

In a 1995 case known as Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Obama and his fellow attorneys charged that Citibank was making too few loans to black applicants and won the case. As one commentator noted in May 2008, legal “successes” such as this were probably responsible for the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007. That is, banks were not loaning to blacks whose credit was poor. When the law forced them to lend money anyway, the inevitable collapse occurred.