By David Nather, CQ Staff

As a university lecturer in constitutional law for more than 11 years, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois might be expected to have strong views about executive power and congressional oversight. What he says about it on the campaign trail, however, is pretty much standard fare for Democratic presidential candidates.

“We’ve paid a heavy price for having a president whose priority is expanding his own power,” Obama said in a speech in October. “The Constitution is treated like a nuisance. . . . We get secret task forces, secret budgeting, slanted intelligence and the shameful smearing of people who speak out against the president’s policies.”

MIDWEST APPEAL: Obama, virtually tied with Clinton in Iowa, addresses a crowd in Des Moines on Nov. 10. (GETTY IMAGES / YANA PASKOVA)

In general, Obama talks about himself as the presidential candidate who would do the most to restore open government and constitutional checks and balances. But voters would pretty much have to take his word for it. Of all the front-running candidates, Obama has left the thinnest paper trail to allow them to make their own judgments.

That may not be too surprising, given that he has served less than three years in the Senate, much of the last year spent campaigning. But for all of Obama’s background in constitutional law, there is a notable absence of writings, such as law journal articles, that might shed light on how he viewed executive power before he was a candidate. His campaign’s decision not to respond to a list of questions on specific subjects, such as war powers and signing statements, ensures that his views can remain vague.

He does have a record of work on measures to make government more transparent, however, which he started in the state Senate and has continued since coming to Washington in 2005. And former law school classmates and students say they have found no inconsistencies between the Obama they knew years ago and the Obama who promises a collaborative style if he becomes president.

“There is nothing about his political persona or his positions today that are at odds with the way he talked about constitutional law back then,” said Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who attended Harvard Law School with Obama.

Dorf doesn’t recall specific conversations about presidential power, but he says Obama’s general approach was always consistent with the view of Robert H. Jackson, a Supreme Court justice in the 1940s and ’50s, that the branches of government accomplish most when they work in consensus, rather than fighting with each other.

At last week’s Democratic candidates debate in Iowa, Obama said one of the first things he would do as president would be to “call in my new attorney general to review every single executive order that’s been issued by George Bush. And any of those that have undermined our Constitution or subverted our civil liberties are going to be reversed.”

Obama has laid out proposals for “a new era of openness,” as he calls it, and has pledged to share decision-making with Congress on national security matters. He has promised to give a series of “fireside webcasts” — modeled on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside radio chats — and to have his national security advisers conduct Internet town hall meetings.

In addition, Obama has promised to conduct monthly meetings on foreign policy with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders and consult them before taking military actions. The group would include the Democratic and Republican leaders and the chairmen and ranking members of the Appropriations, Armed Services, Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees.

Obama also has promised to close the prison at Guant?!namo Bay, Cuba, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions in interrogating prisoners, while conforming to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in tracking suspected terrorists. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime,” he said in a speech in August at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are.”

Obama’s open-government work in the Senate has included co-writing, with Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a law enacted last year requiring the government to create a database of records on federal grants and contracts. He also worked with Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin on this year’s congressional ethics overhaul, which requires greater disclosure of earmarks and bundled campaign contributions gathered by lobbyists.

In addition, Obama cosponsored legislation, which the Senate passed by voice vote this summer, to speed the release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act. His main Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton , did not.

Still, Obama has not been free of controversy about his own willingness to release his political records. In recent weeks, he has come under fire from the national media for claiming that he doesn’t have any records from his eight years representing Chicago in the state Senate. The campaign has said state agencies have records of his correspondences with them but that he did not keep other records. The disclosure came after Obama criticized Clinton for not doing more to release White House records that might illuminate her role in shaping policy during her husband’s administration.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy, says the controversy over Obama’s state Senate records seems to be an exception to an otherwise solid background of support for open government. “I think there’s enough evidence on the record to show that that’s not a pervasive problem with him,” Aftergood said.

Another way to predict the path of an Obama administration is to look at some of his mentors and advisers on legal issues — an exercise that suggests that his administration might be a bit closer to Bush’s exercises in executive power than his speeches imply.

Both Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who had Obama as a student, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor who worked with Obama teaching at the University of Chicago, have taken positions that do not entirely reject the prerogatives Bush has claimed for the presidency. Tribe, for example, has suggested that Bush’s signing statements claiming the right to interpret laws are less dangerous than his critics have claimed. Tribe said it would be a serious mistake to suggest that a president’s only options are to sign a bill or veto it.

Sunstein, meanwhile, has played down the constitutional concerns over the administration’s use of military tribunals to try suspected terrorists. And he has been willing to give the executive branch a fair amount of leeway to interpret laws. In a 2006 article in the Yale Law Journal, he wrote that unless serious constitutional questions are involved, “if the governing statute is ambiguous, the executive should usually be permitted to interpret it as it reasonably sees fit.”