Tips for Millennials Students

One of the things I'm doing this semester is blogging for the Touro Law Center Office of Student Services. If you want to see what kinds of tips and tricks I'm sharing with law students, you can check out that blog at http://tourolawoss.blogspot.com. This week, I'm blogging about different web-based applications students can use to get and stay organized.

I've been tagged!

I've been tagged by Meredith Miller at Contracts Prof Blog. Doh!

So my task it to identify 5 non-law blogs that I like and then tag 5 law-bloggers to do the same.

Here are my 5 non-law blogs:

The Women on the Web
Education Technology
CNN Breaking News (not really a blog, but I read it a lot throughout the day)
NPR (also not a blog, but this has been an exercise in realizing just how out-of-balance my interests really are -- thanks, Meredith)
My Facebook "News" Feed (also not a blog, but very blog like in that it's a constant stream of information from different people)




I tag . . .

Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Profs
Christine Hurt at The Conglomerate
Kathleen Bergin at The Faculty Lounge
Jim Levy at Legal Writing Prof Blog
Caitlin Borgmann at Reproductive Rights Prof Blog

Future Shock

A poll by Cellular South of Ole Miss students before last night's presidential debate indicates that 95% of the students surveyed plan to vote and that a primary concern that they have is their economic future.

One of the anthems of my generation was "My Future's So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)." In stark contrast, it's hard to imagine hearing that the world is on fire and that you're going to graduate just in time to be the "beneficiary" of a collapsed economy you had no part in collapsing.

Advanced Directive for Mental Health

Inside Higher Ed reports on research into an "advanced directive for mental health" that may help schools better deal with students who later experience an episode of a pre-existing mental illness.

I think this would be especially help in the law school setting and especially now and in the near future. Millennials are an intensely pressured generation. People simply cannot maintain the kind of schedules and performance levels that Millennials have maintained their entire lives without eventually suffering some kind of ill effects. For some, it may be as simple as a decline in performance. But for others, it can be the complete inability to cope with a mental illness that has previously been managed effectively with talk therapy and/or medication. When that happens, it would be helpful to have an advanced directive that tells the law school community how best to respond to this student. In twelve years of teaching, I've only had a few students behave really, really inappropriately. In every single case, it was a student who had a psychiatric diagnosis and whose stress level had finally outrun the student's ability to cope with the illness with the previously-prescribed regimen. After an adjustment of medication or therapy, each student was able to continue law school and graduate without further incident.

This could be a tremendous benefit also for lawyers to have an advanced directive on file with the State Bar (I'll leave the downsides to such an idea to others who are better versed in mental health law and privacy, but I do see the red flags). Finally, we would have some use for all that information that the Board of Law Examiners requires people to disclose before they become licensed to practice law. It's one thing to just know that a lawyer has a history of bipolar disorder that was successfully managed at the time of the Bar application; it's another thing entirely to know what to do if that lawyer starts to endanger clients because something about the illness or treatment changes.

I wonder what we might be able to prevent in law school and law practice with that kind of information.

Choosing a School for "Fit" Rather than Rankings

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new interactive system that would allow students to choose a college based on fit for that particular student rather than on a rankings system. It's called College Speaks. It would be a fantastic way to choose a law school, too. Let's hope Law School Speaks isn't far around the corner.

There's Gold in Them Thar Notes!

Inside Higher Ed has a piece on a new social networking service called Knetwit. The hook for this one is that it's a place where people can exchange their class notes. The IHE piece has an interesting discussion of whether this is a copyright violation of professorial work product, and the comments following the piece offer a wide range of views on why professors should or should not care whether notes from their classes are showing up there.

Just as with DocStoc, it looks like the current inventory is confined to just a few schools. And Knetwit doesn't seem to have made any inroads into law school yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.

I don't see too much to get upset about here, though. Students have been buying and selling each other notes for a long time. When I was in law school, students took their notes to a local copyshop to leave on file there. You could go get any one of a dozen students' notes for any given course. I sold my notes in high school and law school. I never considered what I did any kind of violation of the professor's copyright. I was basically a transcription/notetaking service (a rationalization, perhaps), and I charged people based on the value of the transcription, not based on the value of the subject matter or presentation of it. I took the view when I was in school that I continue to take now that I'm a faculty member/administrator: If you think that having the notes of someone who performed well in a class will magically transfer that same level of performance to you, then you don't understand the point of taking notes.

I guess I sort of understand the copyright argument about notes, but it's not as if the student is going to turn those notes in a study guide, submit it to a textbook publisher, and then make money from anothers' work. Also, it's hard to imagine a professor saying, "I assign the study guide to XYZ Text, but the student recorded notes on Knetwit are just as good." With all due respect to the many very intelligent law students out there, I just don't believe that a law student can produce something from the notes that's going to actually cut into the market of whatever the law professor wants to do with her work product. Nor do I think they have the time or attention to do that, even if they wanted to.

It'll be interesting to see where this one goes.

The Dress Code

My seven-year-old daughter knows the drill. Stand up straight and put your right hand over your . . . left shoulder to see if that sundress or tank top is less than three second-grade-fingers wide. If it's less than "three fingers wide," she knows it won't fly, and she changes clothes without being told.

Dress codes carry people all the way through high school, but then we drop them like a bad habit (or a "bad haddock" as my kindergartener used to say). The message I think we're trying to send is "You're an adult. You know better." But based on what I've seen over the years, the message that seems to get conveyed is "You're an adult. Wear whatever you want."

Law school used to be a place where people dressed professionally. Jackets. Ties. The works. I know a lot of folks were sorry to see that fade away. I was not one of them. I started law school in 1991. I'd heard about professional school dress codes but honestly didn't know whether they still existed or not. When we were addressed at orientation by the EIC of the law review wearing (fashionably?) ripped jeans, I concluded that the dress code days were gone (said EIC is now a colleague at another law school, and it's all I could do to resist linking to his picture). Fine by me. I was busy working on a serious case of spinal curvature courtesy of my Con Law book; I didn't need to do it in a suit (and, of course, since I went to law school in the capital-s South, I'd have had to do it in heels and a skirt, too). I'm also hopelessly clumsy, so heels and pantyhose would no doubt have resulted in a debilitating stairway accident. Also, I'd spent my adolescence an early adulthood listening to my grandmother say constantly, "You would be such a pretty girl with just a little lipstick." Grrrrr . . .

But even I -- fashion backward, make-up revulsed -- get that your underwear shouldn't show in law school. I graduated high school in 1986, so I understand "underwear as outwear." I'm hip. I'm cool. It's when your "underwear as underwear" is showing that I have to draw the line. Several years ago while teaching at a different law school, I was in the library and saw one of my students bent over looking for a book. With her thong showing. I have no preconceptions about whether other women should or should not wear thongs. I do, however, have some strong opinions about whether I should be able to see it in the federal digest section of the law library. Since she clearly didn't know her thong was showing, I walked over to her and whispered very quietly (no small feat; in addition to wanting to paint me with lipstick, my grandmother also wanted me to keep my voice down), "Megan (not her real name), your underwear is showing."

She looked at me with a look of embarrassment. "Right!" you say. She should be embarrassed!

But she clearly wasn't embarassed for herself. She was embarrassed for me because I'm clearly an old woman who doesn't know how cute it is to have your thong showing in the law library. Doh!

I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe we should all just arm ourselves with those little black strips that they use in tabloid magazines to indicate that Heidi Klum was topless when we took that picture of her on the beach. It could have some kind of painless adhesive on the back (I'm thinking about the level of a post-it note), and when you see someone's thong, you could just politely step up behind them and pat that over the exposed area.

The World From Their Perspective

The Beloit Mindset List for the college Class of 2012 just came out. These are always fun lists to read and ponder. However, we won't see the 2012 graduates for another 5 years. If you want to read about this year's incoming 1L's, check out the Class of 2007 list.