Back to School

It's speeches such as this one that anger Jessica Allen-Piedra, the person responsible for the yellow flier.

The third-year law student has had her eye on Kobach since she enrolled in law school at UMKC. It's not that she thinks Kobach is a subpar professor. She took his constitutional law class in 2004 and says he's "obviously brilliant."

What upsets Allen-Piedra is that Kobach attends political rallies and appears on news programs, calling undocumented immigrants — such as her husband, Hector Piedra — aliens and criminals. Piedra illegally crossed the Arizona border in 1999; in Kansas City, he worked on a construction crew and eventually played in a Westport blues band. The "rule of law" Kobach wants restored is the system that required Piedra to return to Mexico, separating him from his two young children for the past year. Allen-Piedra spent all of 2006 trying to obtain a legal waiver that would override her husband's automatic 10-year ban on re-entering the United States. After 11 months (the process normally takes four to six months), during which she argued that her husband's absence would force her to abandon her career in law and therefore cause her extreme hardship, the government waived Piedra's ban. Piedra returned to the United States at the end of December.

The yellow flier was unsigned, but most people in the law school knew that Allen-Piedra wrote it. She is a past president of the Hispanic Law Student Association and now leads the UMKC chapter of the liberal National Lawyers Guild. She's also vocal about the law school's low Latino enrollment — just four out of 175 incoming, first-year law students in 2006 were Hispanic.

She's the first to admit that her campaign against Kobach is partly personal. She remembers becoming emotional when she confronted her former professor at a July hearing before the Missouri Senate's Committee for Immigration Reform.

"I looked at him — and he knows my situation — and said, 'You need to think about my family and the people you're hurting.' ... In law school, we get so into this intellectual exchange of ideas, but, no, people are really being hurt by this."

Kobach remembers the encounter.

"One thing she did say, out of the blue, in a militant and obsessive way, was that she would do what it takes to stop me," he says.

But first she'll have to get administrators to see past Kobach's impressive Ivy League résumé and convince students that he doesn't deserve his broad popularity.

At the end of a poorly lighted third-floor hallway, Kobach's office is bright with sunlight. An end table is topped with wooden elephants and other African objects. Gold-scripted diplomas and a signed photograph from President George W. Bush ("To Kris, Best Always") give the office a stately feel. Standing sentinel on the file cabinet is a foot-tall George Washington doll that recites snippets of famous speeches, a gag gift from Kobach's sister.

In soft-focus photographs lining the windowsill, Kobach isn't a politician — he's a smiling husband and the father of two young daughters.

Clutching manila folders to her chest, Banister brings him a legal motion that needs to be signed and sent this afternoon, then confirms a flight on Midwest Airlines for one of his many speaking engagements.

Kobach honed his rhetorical skills early. Growing up in Topeka, he was a debate geek whose team at Washburn Rural High School won the state championship. Kobach placed 12th at the national tournament in 1984.

"I was very competitive," he says. "Probably still am, to be fair. If you were to analyze me, it'd say that."

Jan Kobach says she hates to sound like the typical mom, but Kris was the kind of child who never got into trouble, rarely had to be badgered to do his homework, and got along well with his two younger sisters. "I used to say he was like a little man even when he was really young," she says.

The family lived on a lake. As a kid, Kris won awards for water-skiing. But when the young athlete was diagnosed with diabetes at age 11, Jan says, she couldn't help but worry about his health. Kris apparently didn't, though — he was the type of kid who'd swim the length of the lake in his bid to become an Eagle Scout. In 1993, Kobach came close to capturing a spot on the U.S. national rowing team.

The Kobach family was known around town for owning the local Buick dealership rather than for any political activism. Once he hit high school, Jan says, her son's politics and professional aspirations began to surface. The valedictorian set his mind on the Ivy League, was accepted to Harvard, and wasted no time taking a leadership role with the Harvard Republicans.

"It was a place where, for every controversy, there had to be a debate," Kobach recalls. "So if some Harvard group was opposed to U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, it was: Let's go to the Republican Club and get Kobach to debate."