Law School Dress Codes?

Eric Chafee, guest blogging at The Faculty Lounge, talk about dress codes in law firms and wonders whether the economic forces that are moving attire in law firms away from business casual might impact law school faculty as well. Prof. Chafee says he hopes so.

And I'm just as surprised as anyone else to find that I hope so, too. Look, I'm an Xer. I'll get away with what I can get away with. I only need to see one Boomer colleague head off to class without a jacket on, and I'm in. That's all the permission I need for "business casual." But it is a professional school, for heaven's sake. Law professors talk a lot about how students don't behave like professionals, but I wonder whether we adequately set the tone. If our students had a firm sense of what was and was not professional, then I think we could exercise a little more latitude in some of the superficial parts of being a professional, like whether we wear a jacket to class or not. But failing that, I do think that maybe we ought to be presenting the whole package.

On the other hand, I do notice that it's a guy who is issuing the call for traditionally professional attire. And he cites his friend, another guy. I have a friend who has written about dress code, too. Prof. Kathleen Bergin, permablogger over at Faculty Lounge, wrote a piece for the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism: Sexualized Advocacy: The Ascendant Backlash Against Female Lawyers, or as I like to call it, "Just Wear the Damn Pants." Anytime conversation turns to what is and is not professional, I can't help but notice that the standard seems to be very white and very male.

For me, for the foreseeable future, my clothing choices are ultimately not driven by my sense of professionalism or my politics. They're driven by the fact that I'm in a two-profession family with two small daughters and no family in a 2500-mile radius. I wear what's clean.

Well, what's mostly clean.