Barack Hussein Obama II is the current junior United States Senator from Illinois from 2005 to present day. He was the Democratic nominee for president in the 2008 United States presidential election. Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.